Revenge of the Sith: The Unauthorized Rewrite
by Veriform
Summary: The conclusion to the long-running Unauthorized Rewrite series is here at last. Anakin struggles against the darkness within himself as Palpatine's schemes come to their final fruition and the Republic crumbles. Violence, mature situations, etc. Comments welcome.
1. Chapter One

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH

The brutal war that has ravaged the galaxy for nearly a decade has at last come home to Coruscant.

The streets and towers of the Galactic capital are one vast battlefield, red with the blood of its citizenry.

The Jedi Temple and Galactic Senate remain islands of calm and security in a sea of warfare, but the Republic is in dire straits and order seems to be crumbling.

Anakin Skywalker and his former master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, heroes of the Clone Wars are fighting to save Coruscant from the Separatist invasion. Day after day they wage a ceaseless war against the Confederacy's droid armies while in the Senate unrest under Palpatine's rule begins to stir up after long years of wartime complacency. Senator Padmé Naberrie struggles to restore democracy to a government careering wildly out of control while over everything hangs the enveloping shroud of the Dark Side, omnipresent and evil.

Coruscant, the Jedi and the Republic now rest in a crucible of war, deceit, betrayal and love. Only blood will tell whether or not they survive their test.

CHAPTER ONE: The Chosen One

OBI-WAN

There were no stars on Coruscant. Thousands of years of smog and light pollution had wiped the cosmos from the capital's skies, replacing it with garish billboards and the beacon lights of penthouse apartments and luxurious restaurants. Now even those had gone dark, but the stars remained hidden by the fires of war. Great towers had been gutted by turbolaser fire. Proton torpedoes and concussion missiles had cratered the city-planet's skin. Whole districts had collapsed in on themselves, leaving gaping holes like toothless, ragged mouths in the cityscape. Fires raged across multiple blocks, consuming durasteel, flesh and detritus with equal indifference. Confederate _Providence-_class destroyer-carriers cruised like predatory fish through the lower atmosphere, exchanging occasional desultory fire with groundside turbolaser batteries. To Obi-Wan Kenobi, standing alone on the steps of the Jedi Temple, Coruscant looked as though it had entered its death throes.

_The Republic is dying, _he thought._ These are its last days and we its last and least defenders._

In his enveloping brown cloak and borrowed plastoid armor Obi-Wan felt a cheat, a poor stand-in cobbled together from spare parts. He was a diplomat, not a soldier. The galaxy needed another Qui-Gon, bold and brash and impetuous. Obi-Wan folded his arms against the gathering cold of night. With the atmospheric control satellites lost or destroyed by the CIS navy, Coruscant had begun to swing between climatic extremes. Some nights it was so cold that sweat froze to skin. Others the air seemed so thick and hot it oppressed the lungs and diluted the horizon to a shimmering nightmare of heat and sweat. The Republic's medical centers were working overtime to treat frostbite, hypothermia, heat stroke and malnutrition to say nothing of the colossal clone triage centers where a never-ending procession of Jango Fett's hundred million doppelgangers limped for morpha and whatever cursory attention the Kaminoan medical specialists and gene therapists could spare. Palpatine had instituted a draft to swell the Grand Army's ranks, but still the clones bore the brunt of the Confederacy's wrath.

Recognizable by every man, woman and child in the Galaxy, Fett's doubles were completely faceless. Obi-Wan pitied them. For all that one had tried to kill Padmé, though neither he nor the Jedi Order had ever discovered why, he pitied them. _They die for us without question or choice. _When the Kaminoans had first broached the offer of a clone military the Senate had balked, both at the cost and at the implication of cloning on a grand scale. It had been Palpatine, however reluctant, who had led the charge. _Everything leads back to Palpatine. _Opposed by the stalwart Bail Organa and the majority of the Rim World Senators, Palpatine had nonetheless managed to install himself as Supreme Chancellor and secure the purchase of the Kaminoan army. Obi-Wan remembered the avarice in the eyes of Taun We, the Kaminoan Senator, when the motion had passed.

"General Kenobi."

The clone's crisp, clear voice dragged Obi-Wan from out of his own memories. He turned to face the white-armored man standing above him on the Temple steps. The bulk of that great structure framed him in dark stone, glass and durasteel. It made the clone seem a dwarf, malformed and small.

"What is it, Commander?"

"Generals Windu and Yoda request your presence in the Strategic Room, Sir."

_General Yoda, not Master. Is that what we've become? _

"Thank you, Commander. At ease."

The halls of the Temple, still scarred by Grievous's suicidal rampage, echoed to the click of Obi-Wan's boots against the marmoreal floor. In the Strategic Room, a sunken rectangular chamber walled in holo-displays, he found Yoda and Mace conferring with Plo Koon, the Judicial Committee's head and Jocasta Nu, the Order's Chief Librarian. Between the four Masters hung a holoprojection of Coruscant, incredibly detailed with zones of CIS infringement and control marked out in purple while the Republic's strongholds stood as slate grey. Areas where structural damage to the planetary city structure had been catastrophic stood out like angry orange wounds against the holographic planet's surface, raw and ragged. Obi-Wan descended the steps to the chamber floor. Plo's calm, vox-distorted voice carried over the hum of the Strategic Room's projectors.

"...no trace of embezzlement or profiteering, but the fact remains that he has managed to remain in office well past his elected term. With Senatorial approval, yes, but still..."

"Master Kenobi," said Yoda, glancing up from his intense scrutiny of the rotating holomap of Coruscant. The diminutive Grand Master of the Jedi Council stood no more than two and a half feet tall. His gnarled hands and feet were clawed, his white hair wild and thinning. "What troubles you?"

"The war," said Obi-Wan, truthfully. "My dreams are troubled, Master. The Force is unclear. Meditation has become...difficult."

"The galaxy's suffering clouds all our vision," said Mace, rubbing his chin with a slim, dark hand. The aging Master was clean-shaven, his skull scraped hairless and smooth, but deep lines etched by decades of laughter and worry branched from the corners of his mouth and eyes. "All across inhabited space, the people of the Republic cry out and we are deafened. Here on Coruscant it is worse. More concentrated." As though to underscore his pronouncement the distant strobing boom of a turbolaser blast thrummed dully in the silence. It had to have been close for the sound to penetrate the Temple's walls.

"Indeed," said Plo.

"Grave, their suffering is," said Yoda. "Blinded we are, but not so blind. See we can what lies before our very eyes, Master Kenobi."

Obi-Wan's blood ran cold. _It all comes back to Palpatine. _"I can't ask him," he said. "The Chancellor has been a father to Anakin."

"The Jedi renounce their families," said Plo. "We have no fathers. Anakin is too close to Palpatine, the Chancellor's influence over him too great. He must know what Palpatine plans, and with the war's end so close at hand it is imperative we know whether or not the Chancellor plans to relinquish his power."

"Uncertain, the war's end is," said Yoda, "yet correct is Master Plo. Know Palpatine's mind, we must. Enlist Anakin's aid you will."

There was iron in the old Master's voice. Obi-Wan stared into the depths of the hologram, watching the live display morph and change. "I haven't spoken to him in some time," he said at last.

"You were his master, Obi-Wan," said Mace. "He will listen to you."

_If they knew, _thought Obi-Wan. _If they guessed, we would both be expelled from the Order. _He cleared his throat. "I will broach the subject," he said after a long, tense pause. "I was invited to the Chancellor's charity opera. I had declined, but it would present an opportunity to approach Anakin." _He comes to the Temple so seldom these days. Small wonder._

"Attend," said Mace. "Discover what you can."

"Anakin has become reckless," said Plo. "He must be reined in, or else we risk having another Dooku on our hands. If he _is _the Chosen one-"

"Unclear, the prophecy is," said Yoda. "Only guess at its meaning, we can." Silence echoed in the room for a moment, and then Yoda began to speak. Obi-Wan knew the words well. "He will bring balance to the Force, but he shall no know peace. He will be a conduit to its Will, but he shall not know his own. Twice he will die and twice he will be reborn, and the Galaxy will shake at the rumor of his passage." The ancient Master closed his eyes.

_How many times have I read it? _wondered Obi-Wan. The ancient scroll itself, preserved in an airtight room in the Library archives, had been penned in Ubese by some Jedi, a seer, whose name was lost to time. How many hours he had spent poring over that fragile scrap of paper? Hundreds. So many hundreds. _How could I take what happiness he has, if he will never know real peace? Did I make the right decision?_

"May the Force be with you, Obi-Wan," said Mace.

"Indeed," said Plo.

Yoda gestured with a gnarled hand and the holoprojection of Coruscant faded into scattered light, and then into nothing. The other Masters left by separate doors, their shadows trailing behind them like weary bars of night. Obi-Wan stood for a time, thinking, and then he departed.

ANAKIN

The darkness sheltered him from the prying eyes of Dooku's Geonosian guards as he crept along the crumbling ledge of the Count's Menari-district apartment building, a towering marble-sheathed obelisk located at the heart of what was left of Coruscant's most palatial sector. Once Senators, Admirals, royalty and corporate solicitors had made their homes in the shadow of the Menari Mountains, Coruscant's last natural landmark, but now only the Count and his cronies, his hangers-on and sycophants, remained, ensconced in the monolithic bulk of the former Twin Suns Luxury Tower. Two _lucrehulk-class _merchant battleships hung over the Menari district, the downdraft of their repulsor engines impregnating everything with a faint tingle of static. Anakin, dressed only in an insulated black singlesuit and hooded black cloak, clung to the ledge like a duracrete barnacle, squinting into the cold wind of Coruscant's lower atmosphere. His eyes watered. His stump ached.

_I can feel you, Dooku._

The Count, renegade Jedi and grand rebel statesman, was coiled, serpentine and waiting, somewhere within the tower's cavernous interior. Anakin edged onward, gloved fingers both organic and mechanical feeling for purchase on the marble wall. The window wasn't far. Another ten yards spent inching onward, avoiding the temptation to look down into the bottomless abyss of Coruscant's fissured skin, and he was there. The wind howled in his ears. The fading concussions of distant explosions beat against him like the papery wings of insects. The bone-deep cold of the marble struck his right hand even through his glove. Anakin Skywalker closed his eyes and let the Force take him, let it fill him with light and power and sensation.

It was different than it had been before. Once he had known conflict, strain and strife. The howl of Coruscant's million, billion inhabitants had deafened him. The sound of the Force itself, stripped of its protective layers of dross by the peace and silence of Padmé's Naboo lake house, had been worse, a ceaseless, mindless roar of unimaginable immensity. Now the inferno of his power was contained, caught inside a mental shell of durasteel and ceramite. His mind was a blast furnace roaring out of control, burning with the heat of a bottled sun. It was the only way to stay alive, and even so he could feel the flames of his own mad awareness licking at his skin.

Anakin twitched a finger and his lightsaber disengaged itself from his belt and floated, rotating slowly, toward the window. It was harder to direct than it had been, as though he reached out through thick, viscous syrup with his will. The city around him pulsed with murky life, the mutters of defeated souls going about their lives in the wreckage of their once-glorious capital and the alien chatter of Geonosians swarming throughout the tower and its grounds. _A thousand miles from the Senate Round, and the distance gets shorter every day. _The CIS was conducting its campaign against the Grand Army with ruthless efficiency. All over Coruscant droid factories and massive refineries had sprung up like gross boils, converting the planet's wealth of processed materials into new weapons for the Confederate war machine. Columns of battle droids and their sleeker, more modern cousins clomped in perfect formation down abandoned skyways while _vulture_-class droid starfighters patrolled the skies in lightning-quick swarms. Several flights had already passed Anakin by, their sensors fooled by the tower's reflective surface and by the low-power scrambler at the Jedi's belt.

Another twitch of the finger and the lightsaber blazed to sapphire-bright life with its distinctive _snap-hiss_ of plasma devouring oxygen. Anakin directed the meter-long blade in a precise cut, slicing a neat circle from the triple-thick safety glass, which he wrapped in a cushioning mental sphere and lowered to the unseen floor, of the window. He deactivated the weapon, caught it and returned it to his belt before slithering swiftly through the still-smoking opening. The room within was derelict, a lush suite abandoned by its wealthy occupants when the invasion had begun. Crystal chandeliers hung from a bloodwood ceiling elaborately grown to resemble a cathedral's vaulted heights. The bare floors were polished marble, black as night and veined with carnelian.

Alertness surged through the tower. A thousand distinct awarenesses, the chittering minds of Dooku's Geonosians, and the blurry crackle of droid brains converged in scrutiny on Anakin's point of entry. A smile cracked the cold, hard glaze of the Jedi's face as the furnace in his chest burned brighter. He'd guessed the walls themselves would be alarmed. "This is going to be interesting," he said to the empty room. _I wonder if I'll be back in time for the opera._ His lightsaber was already lit and in his hands when the first of the B2 super battle droids came through the door, wrist blasters already locked and firing. Anakin flew through the opening motions of Soresu, letting his instincts guide his lightsaber as it _thrumm-_ed through the air. Blaster bolts ricocheted off of the walls, the floor and the chromed carapaces of the ponderous B2's. One exploded, its fuel cells ruptured. Anakin bobbed and spun, his lightsaber weaving a curtain of blinding azure radiance around him. He existed in the moment.

_I am a drop of rain caught in a storm._

He deflected a withering hail of blaster fire into another of the droids, blasting it to scrap, and then halved a third with an overhand slash. Sparks exploded around him as he pirouetted away from the ruined droid to plunge his lightsaber into the armored chassis of yet another. Blaster fire sputtered out with a pathetic _clunk _of spin-seal rotators jamming and the droid fell forward with a crash that shook the entire suite. Anakin grinned, coming around into a backhanded slash with a wild yell on his lips. The blaster bolt missed his right eye by half an inch and ripped his face open along the harsh line of his cheekbone. The smell of cooked meat filled the air and blackness swallowed the right half of Anakin's world. He cried out, pain beating the side of his skull like a stun club. _I could die._

_ Padmé._

_ The children._

There was light, a lurid red wash of heat and radiance that swept everything else away. He felt himself floating in a void, buoyed by some inner reservoir of energy. Strange, etheric tides buffeted him from all sides, but their touch was gentle and he felt no alarm. There was no reason to be worried. The mission would proceed as planned. Dooku would die and the war, at last, would be over. _I can leave the order, live my own life. I can be a husband. A father. I can..._

He stood gasping for breath in the center of a war zone. The hacked and mangled remains of better than a dozen droids were scattered around the oil-drenched room, along with the bodies of a pair of Geonosian guards. The insectoid aliens were just over five feet tall and delicately built with long, cadaverous faces and bony limbs. Their gossamer wings, ripped and crumpled now, looked like the wax paper kites children had flown in the Wind Gardens near the Senate Round before the invasion. Anakin stared at them, breathing hard. His right cheek felt numb and his vision was speckled with little spots of black. His muscles, wound like wires, ached with tension. His mechanical hand opened and closed as though of its own volition. An instant later he realized that someone in the building had triggered an alarm klaxon. Soon every guard in the building would come crashing down on him. From a distance he heard the rumble of droidekas moving in wheel configuration over flat, hard ground.

Fortunately, Anakin had chosen his point of entry into the tower for a reason. The marble floor cracked and bubbled as Anakin plunged his lightsaber hilt-deep into its perfect mirror finish. Durasteel support beams melted like butter as insulation burst into flames and choking fumes boiled up into the suite. Anakin held his breath, fighting the stinging pain in the side of his face. There was a medical droid waiting two miles away with his atmospheric fighter in the safehouse he'd chosen. His face would have to wait until he'd made his escape. The floor shifted beneath his feet as he turned in place, inscribing a meter-deep cut into the now-ruined floor. He managed not to smile when, just as a pair of droidekas clattered into the doorway and unfolded themselves into murderous action, the floor dropped out from under his feet and he plummeted down into Count Dooku's bedchamber.

The durasteel-and-marble plug crashed through the bedchamber's polished hardwood floor and down into the tower's further depths, but Anakin Skywalker did not fall with it. He stepped onto the creaking floorboards, the Force raging within him, and brought his lightsaber up just in time to meet the Count's blood-red blade. The two sabers crackled against each other, throwing bruise-colored shadows over the unadorned walls. Dooku was hooded, cloaked in shadows. Anakin could see nothing of his face. The aged Jedi moved with sinuous grace, stabbing and thrusting at Anakin's heart like a Corellian sand viper. Anakin backpedaled, turning Dooku's attacks aside with brute force. He was stronger than the old man, strong enough to break him.

No. Not him. A looping counterattack stirred the figure's hood and Anakin saw for an instant that pale, pale skin, those thin lips and that pointed chin. Not him. _Her. _Asajj Ventress. "YOU," he roared. The deep wound on his cheek broke and began to bleed again, but there was no pain. There was nothing but focus, needle-sharp and absolute, and beneath that: rage. "I'LL KILL YOU."

She laughed, a high, ragged sound, and skipped away from him like a gleeful child playing tag. A second lightsaber snapped to life in her left hand, throwing the room into harsh red relief. In a heartbeat Anakin was after her. She raced out the door, bare feet pattering over polished wood, and when she slammed the door in Anakin's face he blew it apart with the Force. It felt good to break something, to reach out and _crush. _He burst out into the hall, power raging around him. A battle droid appeared from a neighboring apartment and he reached through its armored shell with his mind and ripped its innards apart in an explosion of sparks and blazing oil. _She's getting away. _His heart pounded against his chest as he raced down the hall past ornate doors and sparkling holo-trails where incongruous Alderaanian skies beamed down on scenic footpaths. Fountains burbled and avians sang or croaked random words in voices disturbingly sentient in tone.

How had Ventress survived him? How had that _bitch _escaped the destruction he had wrought on Tattooine, where she had killed his mother? Truthfully, Anakin didn't care. Dooku was forgotten. He wanted to kill her again, and he wanted to make sure it stuck this time. She danced ahead of him, lightsabers striking sparks from the walls as she spun and leapt, hood thrown back and cheeks flushed with exertions. He leapt after her down a flight of stairs, nearly braining himself on a low-hanging lintel, and landed lightly in an echoing white marble hall, its far end dominated by a colossal picture window, with artificial waterfalls cascading down its immaculate walls. The water crashed into ornamental basins linked to one another by narrow channels that ran along the hall's circumference. The water, the trickle and splash of the water in that Tusken temple in the arid bones of their empty settlement. Anakin surged after Ventress, already sprinting away across the hall. He had become a machine, tireless and driven by the urge to destroy. A piston hammered where his heart had been.

_Mother._

Asajj ducked under his vicious two-handed slash, turned aside his brutal thrust and jumped nimbly over his backhand. Her sabers darted and kissed, scorching flesh and cloth alike. The crash of droid magna-peds on marble and the dry rattle of Geonosian wings were drawing close again, and in greater numbers now. He could feel them, and also Dooku. The Count's anger was dry and cool, but building. He would not be long in coming, and Anakin could no longer hope to kill him. Failure after failure. "DIE," he roared, whaling away at Asajj's swift, lithe defenses. "DIE."

She fell back, smiling viciously as she spun and twirled. She ripped off her cloak and dropped it to the marble floor. Beneath it she wore a grey bodysleeve that covered her from throat to mid-thigh. Her pale skin was slick with sweat.

"DIE."

The cage of ruby light around her slender form began to falter. Her tempo broke. She retreated, the smile wiped from her face by fear. Dooku was coming. His guards were almost upon them. Already the odd blaster bolt whined across the vast emptiness of the hall, throwing up curtains of steam where they struck the water at the base of the sheeting falls.

"DIE."

His lightsaber hacked through her right-hand weapon, reducing it to a sparking wreck. He reached out with the Force and ripped her remaining blade from her hand. It clattered over the marble floor. Anakin waved a hand and the hall's pressure doors slammed down, cutting off the approaching guards. The furnace in his chest glowed brighter. _I can do anything._ Ventress stared at him, shocked and frightened. Her lip trembled. "Please," she managed.

There was no mercy in Anakin's heart. He raised his right hand, his _real _hand, and the Force answered his summons, it obeyed him as it would obey no other. _Mother. _Asajj rose up from the floor, iron bands of power wrapped like fingers around her throat. Anakin squeezed, rage twisting his features into an awful mask. Asajj choked out a strangled word. Her grief and fear pounded against Anakin's awareness. He felt the cartilage in her neck crack, then brake. Her vocal cords burst. Her trachea ruptured. Bone punctured skin. Her wide, pale eyes never left his. Even when her spine snapped, she still stared at him. Anakin let her lifeless corpse drop to the floor. The sound of blasters pounding against the pressure doors seemed dull and distant. He deactivated his lightsaber and took a deep, shuddering breath. Dooku was getting closer.

In nine huge bounds Anakin crossed the hall and flung himself through the picture window, into the howling wind and the night. He flew down through the darkness, but he was not afraid. He knew he would not die. The Force watched over him.

DOOKU

The last of his private cloning facilities had been destroyed in a bombing run on Ord Mantell. Sidious had said it was necessary, that the bombing campaign against the Confederate installation there was so obvious he'd have been deposed had he argued against it. Grudgingly, Dooku, the ninth Count Serenno, had accepted the words of Palpatine, a vicious Naboo gutter rat who had clawed his way into power behind a mask of genteel compassion for the Galaxy's plight. Now, though, Asajj was dead. She was dead, and he was alive. Alive because he'd risen from his sleeping mat to answer his bladder's urgent summons, to squeeze out a few painful drops into the privy. The curses of old age. He had left her curled catlike on the mat, her knees pulled up against her flat chest, her face peaceful in sleep.

She lay like a broken bird in the center of the windswept hall, framed by the burbling waterfalls and the shattered picture window. The battle droids had returned to their posts at Dooku's command. He was alone with his apprentice. Skywalker had crushed her throat. He had _destroyed _her. "Asajj," Dooku said. He knelt down and gathered the bloodied, broken body into his arms. Her head lolled against his shoulder, drooling blood onto his bare skin. He felt his years, felt the dull ache of other loves lost, other friends murdered. "I failed you, my darling," he said quietly, kissing her bare scalp. Her skin was cooling already. "I failed you."

Never again.

{My friend. Geonosis grieves with you.}

Archduke Poggle the Lesser stood at the foot of the hall's main stair, his cane planted between his gnarled feet. His wings buzzed fitfully as he limped toward Dooku, the report of his cane's metal butt loud against the marble. He was large for a Geonosian, heavy with fat and muscle beneath his chitinous exoskeleton. A fleshy beard gave him a goatish, absurdly grave appearance and he had a miser's black, beady eyes, but despite his repugnant aspect and his regrettable inhumanity Dooku counted him a closer friend than he did any other members of the Confederacy's Leadership Council. He had known Poggle for decades. "Archduke," Dooku managed. "I would as soon you returned another time. I am not myself at present."

Poggle shook his head, setting his tendrils wagging. {A man is entitled to his sorrow. Without it, how would we know we still lived?}

Dooku knew he should rise, that he should have Asajj taken to the tower's mortuary and tended to by the medical droids. He could not let go of her, though. Not yet. He had a campaign to oversee, a carefully orchestrated dance meant to secure the galaxy for himself and Palpatine. And Skywalker, of course. Foul, retiring Skywalker who had fled rather than face him. He ground his teeth, tears stinging the corners of his eyes. Poggle came to stand at his side, placing a clawed hand on his shoulder.

{Our game with Sidious is nearing its conclusion,} said the Archduke. Of all the Separatist leaders, only Poggle had been informed of the ultimate design of Dooku and his Master, though he did not know the truth of Sidious's dual identity.

"Yes," said Dooku, unable to hide the bitterness in his voice. "It is." He eased Asajj to the floor and folded her hands over her stomach. She looked young in death, and he felt old. So damnably old.

{You are, perhaps, displeased with him. With Sidious.}

Dooku glanced sharply at the Archduke. "Speak plainly," he said.

Poggle met Dooku's stare without flinching. {If you wish it,} he said, {another piece can be brought into play. Something of which Sidious has no knowledge.}

The wind blowing through the hall seemed suddenly bitter cold. Dooku gathered the Force around himself, letting his grief ebb away into its murmuring depths. "What are you talking about?"

From a pocket of his ornate vest Poggle produced a palm-sized holoprojector. He keyed its display button and a tiny image snapped into vivid life above its projection base. A chill crept up Dooku's spine. His mouth felt dry. "Poggle," he heard himself say. "Is that a moon?"

The Archduke was silent for a long moment, and then he said simply: {No, my friend. It is not.}


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO: The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise

PADME

The Mon Bannu Opera House was a wonder of Coruscanti architecture, a great rose-pearl series of scalloped wings that folded one around the other into something like a colossal conch. There were no windows, but the Mon Bannu's lush interior glowed with a soft green light that, combined with the million-gallon aquarium wrapped around the interior of the structure's spiral, contrived to create an atmosphere of total submergence in gently eddying waters. Padmé, along with a crowd composed largely of Senate notables, followed the tall, elegant figure of Madame Ilaghi Ackbar, the Mon Bannu's owner and patroness, around the spiral. Footsteps echoed in the aquatic dim while the bizarre sea life of a hundred different worlds flitted and lurked behind the triple-thick glass of the aquarium. A dwarf Colo swam past through the murk, its lantern eyes piercing the gloom, its claws grasping fitfully at nothing. It vanished into the darkness of the aquarium's artificial reef. Padmé hadn't seen one of the beautiful, deadly creatures in years. _When was I last on Naboo?_

_ You know the answer to that, Padmé. _The lake house at Varykino, just after the attempt on her life. Before Anakin. Before the children. As always, thinking of the twins brought Padmé's heart into her throat. Here she was, dressed in a gown of Bothan shimmersilk with jewels glittering on her fingers and a choker of obsidian slats around her neck, her hair done up in a style that had cost more than most families paid for a month's food, while her children remained under the watchful eye of their Ithorian nanny Nuodo, a mute Anakin had hired from a private agency. He'd wanted clones on hand to guard the apartment, but Padmé had flatly refused. She wanted nothing to do with Fett's progeny.

The children would be safe with Nuodo.

The music began as the senators reached the upper levels of the Mon Bannu. The spiral opened suddenly on the opera house's innermost chamber, the Grand Sonorium that stretched from its lowest level far beneath the upper reaches of Coruscant to its peak a hundred meters above the heads of the Senators, suddenly dwarfed by the rose-colored vaults of the great spiral dome. Thin catwalks branched out over the walls, leading to private boxes shaped like spiral shells. In the vast open space of the Sonorium, though, hung the true centerpieces of the Mon Bannu. Ten enormous spheres of water, held in place by complicated networks of repulsor fields, floated above the distant floor like little planets of shifting liquid. The smell of salt was in the damp air as the senators, silenced by the sheer echoing immensity of the Sonorium, broke into clots and vanished into the branching network of stairways, catwalks and lift platforms. Padmé glanced to her left where the Chancellor's inner circle was making its way to his private box, a grand privacy-screened affair on the far wall. Palpatine looked tired, his hair more white than grey, his face deeply lined.

"It's hard to remember anything before he was in office, sometimes."

Padmé turned. Bail Organa, consort of Alderaan's hereditary ruler Queen Breha, and that planet's representative, stood beside her. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a neat goatee and thick, dark hair. His dress was simple, his manner unpretentious. "I know just what you mean, Senator," said Padmé, careful to keep her tone neutral as she adopted her best pre-packaged smile. It matched the choker of Krayt pearls around her throat. "The war has changed so much."

Organa nodded, looking somber. "Would you join me in my box tonight, Senator Naberrie?"

"I would be honored," Padmé said. She had intended to join her colleague Mon Mothma of Chandrila, a fellow member of the Reconciliation Committee, but Organa was much more highly-placed in the Senate. The Alderaanian sat on the Chancellor's private War Council. Padmé let Organa take her arm and together they climbed a narrow stair with filigreed rails to the Senator's box, a three-seated affair set high up on the southern arc of the Sonorium's inner well. Organa took the left-hand seat, graciously leaving the central seat of honor for Padmé. She sat.

"I'm told tonight's performance has a somewhat irregular origin," said Organa, looking down at the rippling surfaces of the water-spheres.

"Oh?" said Padmé.

Madam Ackbar floated from the periphery of the Sonorium to its center on a repulsor dais not unlike the Chancellor's in the Senate Round. She began to give a long, boring speech about patronage of the arts and the importance of beauty during times of great suffering and deprivation. Padmé wondered if anyone within a mile of the Mon Bannu really knew what deprivation felt like. _We've lost touch, _she thought, _if we ever had it. This has all gone on too long._

Organa nodded. "It's a Sith tragedy, penned by their last Emperor. The Mon Cal have adapted it into a water ballet at the Chancellor's request. He has a soft spot for Sith scholarship."

"A Sith tragedy?" Padmé's stomach turned. The last Sith she had met had been Darth Maul, Qui-Gon's murderer who had bisected Naboo's Queen before her eyes without a second thought. Nute Gunray had taken the secrets of Maul's origins to his grave, but the shroud of Sith involvement in the war had hung over Senate and Council both since the inception of hostilities so many years ago. She grimaced. "It seems in bad taste."

"Doesn't it?" said Organa as Madam Ackbar's dais floated back into the concealment of her privacy screen and from the ceiling high above the reddish-pink forms of ten Mon Cal balletists dove in unison into the watery spheres. Applause rose from the galleries as the low, droning intonations of a full Mon Cal chorus swelled from the murky depths of the Sonorium. The ballet had begun.

Padmé's eyes wandered from the wondrous maneuvers of the water dancers to the privacy-screened dimness of the Chancellor's Box. Sometimes she thought she could _feel _the old politician's presence, as though the essence of him had overflowed his frail, aging frame and polluted the world around him. She looked at Bail, but he appeared distracted by the ballet. It _was _a glorious sight. Wearing only long, fluttering strips of red cloth the dancers fell and spun between the spheres to the droning of their peers in the chorus far below. They moved without pause or cease, passing one another sometimes by mere inches as they flew between spheres, droplets of salt water flying from their clammy skin. The privacy field hissed over cloth as someone else entered Organa's box.

"Ah," said the Senator, smiling at the new arrival. "Master Kenobi. I'm so glad you could make it. Can I offer you a drink?"

"No, thank you," said Obi-Wan as he took the box's last remaining seat. Obi-Wan's eyes found Padmé. "Senator Naberrie," he said.

Padmé forced herself to keep smiling. Just because Obi-Wan knew her secret didn't mean he was here to blackmail her in concert with Organa. He wasn't the kind of man who would allow himself to be involved in such a crass betrayal. "Obi-Wan," she said, injecting as much warmth into her voice as she could manage even as she ran through the mental exercises she had taught herself to cloud her thoughts and guard her mind against Jedi perceptions. "It's good to see you. It's been too long."

"Indeed," said Obi-Wan. His own smile was hesitant. He, like every Jedi Padmé had seen in the past year, looked tired. His auburn beard was untrimmed, his blue eyes bleary with lack of sleep.

"Senator Naberrie and I were just discussing the origins of tonight's performance," Organa said. "Are you familiar with the writings of the last Sith Emperor?"

Obi-Wan's brow furrowed. "In passing," he said. "His work tends toward the macabre. Is the ballet an adaptation?"

"Yes," said Organa. "One of his later efforts."

Obi-Wan looked troubled.

Padmé's heart leapt into her throat as she caught sight of Anakin making his solitary way along a catwalk toward the Chancellor's box. He moved quickly, but his left cheek was covered by a bacta patch and his robes were stained and torn. _What was he doing tonight? _Since he had become, at Palpatine's insistence, the Order's liaison to the office of the Chancellor he had been absent more and more, off pursuing Palpatine's mysterious agenda. Sometimes when he returned to the apartment they shared in secret he would refuse to tell her what he'd done. Other times his hurt was obvious, his pain impossible to salve. Once he had come home in such a rage that he'd destroyed the droid doorman, smashing the 3P0 unit to pieces with the Force. Padmé had locked herself and the children in Nuodo's little sleeping chamber until Anakin's anger had burned down to cold ash. Sometimes, though, he was tender and thoughtful. Sometimes he moved in step with the universe around him, serene as Qui-Gon had been, and in those times she loved him.

"If he _is_ Sith," Obi-Wan said carefully, "it is a very foolish move on his part."

Padmé's ears rang. She watched Anakin join the Chancellor in his box, passing through the privacy screen surrounding it and vanishing into gloom. "The Chancellor?" she heard herself whisper.

"The Order has been investigating him since the invasion began," said Obi-Wan. His eyes never left the spiraling dancers, but Padmé knew he had seen Anakin go into Palpatine's box. The Jedi continued. "I know you harbor your own suspicions concerning his motivations. The Council and its allies thought it time we extended a hand to you, Senator."

Padmé wet her lips. Her hands shook on the arms of her seat and her skin felt suddenly cold and clammy. She had known, somehow, that circumstance would place her on side of the board opposite Anakin. It was something they had discussed. _The more distance between our political stances, _he'd said as they lay together in their bed, his real hand on the dome of her pregnant belly, _the less cause anyone has to suspect us. Beyond that, we might be able to use it to our advantage. _

She had disliked the idea, in the beginning. Now, though, it appeared to have borne fruit. If Kenobi and Organa unmasked the Chancellor as a Sith, she could sway Anakin against his old mentor and create a power vacuum with Palpatine's destruction. If, however, they failed she could turn them in to Anakin to increase his trust in her. A dangerous situation, but one rich in potential.

"Accepted," she said. "Tell me what I need to do."

DOOKU

Sidious wanted him dead, that much was plain. Treachery, after all, was the way of the Sith and the old monster hadn't hesitated to kill his own Master. Alone in his meditation chamber, Dooku considered the sloppiness of the attempt on his life. Skywalker was powerful, skilled beyond a doubt and growing more ruthless by the day, but a solo assault on the epicenter of the Confederacy's occupation of Coruscant was still more than the young Jedi could reasonably be expected to pull off without a hitch. Dooku sighed and passed a hand over his lined, unshaven face. He sat alone with Asajj's corpse in his private meditation chamber, a domed redoubt in the deepest sublevel of his manse. The guard patrols had failed to apprehend Skywalker and Dooku, blind with rage, had retreated into the comforting embrace of the Force. It pulsed and thundered all around him, now.

Asajj. He had found her starving and half-dead in the death pits of Rattatak, a miserable slum far on the outermost extreme of the Outer Rim territories. The owners had pitted her against hundreds before Dooku had bought her from them. She'd attacked him almost as soon as they arrived at his villa on Serenno, just a few years before the war's inception. Somehow she had gotten hold of a Jedi's lightsaber and had smuggled it with her out of the arena. A quick duel and a dose of Force Lightning had shown her the error of her ways. Beneath her brutal exterior he had found a wounded, raging, vulnerable girl and molded her over the years into a viciously effective Sith. She had become something else, though. Something more than apprentice, more than lover. She had been his daughter, the little girl he'd never had. He cupped her cheek with a wrinkled hand, looking into her vacant eyes. "I loved you," he said.

Now, because of Sidious and Skywalker, she was dead. Sidious had never cared for her. He'd thought her too unstable, too prone to violent outbursts to make a true Sith. To Sidious, though, there was really only one candidate for apprentice. Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon's last Padawan and the supposed Chosen One. Dooku let his rage fill him, let it burn the lining of his stomach and claw at his aging heart with fiery talons. He let sorrow howl in the pit of his belly, let grief and loss scream in his aching chest. He let the Dark Side reign, let it have his mind and serenity be damned. The world acquired a burnt, orange-red hue as his breath came quicker and quicker. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose and ran through his short, well-trimmed beard. Poggle's weapon was his road to vengeance, but the thing was as yet half-built. He needed other tools.

He needed other plans.

It had been so long ago that Sidious had come to him, robed in shadow, his many voices echoing from the walls of Dooku's penthouse apartment in a symphony of whispers. He had been days out of the Order, then, his whole world lost in a sea of self-loathing and fear that he had spent his life propping up a junta of corrupt arbiters who cared for nothing but their own self-righteous philosophies. There had been scant comfort for him, then, but what he could find at the bottom of the bottles he drained in his search for death or redemption. Liquor had drowned the whimpers he heard through the Force, had silenced the demonic voices of his fellow Masters, Oppo Rancisis and Ki-Adi Mundi, when they had gone to Kalee to end the war between the Huk and the Kaleesh. To end it not to secure peace and justice but so the Republic could resume its purchasing of pharmaceuticals from the Huk. Even in the deep calm of meditation, Dooku's hands became fists. Sidious had come to him then, while he wrestled with himself in depression's clutches. He had not revealed his true identity for years, but even that first brush with the glory of the Sith had been intoxicating.

_You have paid homage at the altar of lies, _the Sith Lord had said. _You have trimmed from your soul that which makes us strong, excised from yourself the ocean of power that comes with knowing one's hatred, one's rage and fear and love. The Jedi are empty husks channeling the mute will of an idiot force of nature. They understand nothing of what it is to wield the Force, to seize it by its throat and compel it to obey. You have seen children playing with fire and thought them gods, but that is folly. I am Sidious. I am power, and I will show you the meaning of Sith._

Then pain, and the beginning of his long and agonizing tutelage at the hands of the Dark Lord. He had learned things under Sidious's instruction, had shed the skin of his depression and exchanged it for the luxurious robes of power. Together they had hatched a plot to reform the Galaxy, to excise the corruption and stupidity of the Republic, to put the lesser races in their place beneath mankind's guiding hand. How bright it had seemed then, their dream of rebuilding Darth Traya's Sith Triumvirate. He had objected to Maul's inclusion in their scheme, but even he had been forced to admit that the beast possessed his uses. Then Qui-Gon had died at his hands, and Dooku's disillusionment with the Sith had begun. _How did it take me so long to see it?_

"First Skywalker," said Dooku to the darkness. His voice, his famous voice that had inspired the galaxy's trillions to rebel, to throw off the oppression of the Republic, fell on dead ears. Without another word he dropped back into the seething, tumultuous comfort of the Force. He closed his eyes and saw his master's face staring back at him, lips curled upward in that gloating grin. Rage crushed his heart in iron hands. He knew, in that instant, the lever he needed to pull to rip Skywalker's happiness from his murdering hands, to bring Sidious's plans crashing down around his ears. It was all so simple, really, in its petty logic.

It was time, at long last, for Darth Tyranus to get his hands dirty.

PALPATINE

The boy was late. But then, he was always late. He cut an imposing figure in his Jedi robes as he strode in silence along the catwalk to the Chancellor's Box, dark hair cropped close to the lines of his skull, one cheek plastered with Bacta-soaked bandages. The low drone of the Mon Cal water dancers swelled in the briny air. Palpatine gestured with two fingers and his hangers-on ceased their conversation, rose from their seats and departed without comment. Mas Amedda, his Chagrian deputy, shot him a meaningful glance as he slipped through the privacy screen and into the adjacent box. Palpatine returned the alien's expression without feeling. Mas thrived on thinking he was included, that he was privy to secrets others only dreamed of. An idiot, and easily controlled.

Skywalker stepped into the box, the privacy field sliding over his robes like oil. Close at hand he looked windswept and exhausted. "Anakin," said Palpatine, "please, sit."

The Jedi Knight collapsed into the seat beside Palpatine's and sat for a moment, breathing deeply. "Ventress was there," he said, his voice flat and dead. "She was in Dooku's bedchamber. I killed her, again, and then the guards descended and I had to escape. Either he knew I was coming or it was an accident of timing. Either way, Dooku is alive, and he knows it was me."

"There are no accidents," said Palpatine. "No, I'm afraid this means we have been compromised. I feared as much, I confess. The mission was too audacious, and too dangerous. I worried you wouldn't return, Anakin." He let his voice fail him, let it trail off into the suggestion of tears as though he were a father mourning the blind pride that had cost him his favorite son. "You didn't tell anyone, did you? Anyone within the Order?"

Anakin's answering look was flat and emotionless, but Palpatine felt his pain at the suggestion of even such a small betrayal. "Of course not," he said.

Palpatine sighed and passed a hand over his face. Outside the privacy screen the Mon Cal spun through the air, enacting the Sith Emperor's last and greatest tragic play. "Anakin, Anakin," said the Chancellor, "I didn't mean to suggest that you'd committed any fault. Normally, the Order would be above suspicion...but I'm afraid that's changed. My surveillance systems recorded one of their spies, you see, attempting to plant a listening device in my private apartments."

"You're sure it was one of theirs?"

_Theirs, _thought Palpatine, suppressing a smile. _Not ours, theirs. _"I'm afraid there really can't be any doubt about it, my boy," he said. "I was as shocked as you are now."

Anakin's mechanical fist creaked. "I've let you down," he said.

"No, Anakin," said Palpatine. "No, you've been an exemplary liaison, a strong right arm." _A son to me. _He has all but said it a dozen or a hundred times. Anakin had always craved a father. "This is my failing. I should have seen sooner that in your present position your power is limited. For some time now I've meant to make you my personal representative on the Jedi Council itself."

The Force was so _loud_ in the boy's proximity. It conformed to his every change in mood, pulsed in time to his heart, swirled around him as though he were the eye of a maelstrom. He was in it, and it was in him. _What did we make in the swamps of Naboo? _wondered Palpatine, not for the first time. He cleared his throat. "Well?"

The Force snapped into glassy stillness.

"I don't know what to say," said Anakin. "The Council has always chosen its own."

"I'm confident that they'll accept my decision," said Palpatine. He looked at the boy, matched his stare. "They would be fools to deny your importance, Anakin."

The boy's guilty pleasure at the praise was palpable. He was confused. For a while they watched the ballet as the dancers swam and spun, leapt and pirouetted. Great streamers of water hung in midair and the drone of the choirs drowned out all other noises. Reflections danced on the walls of the Sonorium, washing the Mon Bannu's rose-hued inner spiral with gold. Palpatine closed his eyes and let the music wash over him. It really was a beautiful suite. He let the silence stretch on for the better part of half an hour before he opened his eyes and finally spoke. "Are you familiar, Anakin with the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?"

Apprehension stirred in the boy's heart. He glanced at Palpatine, returned his attention to the ballet. "No," he said. "I've never heard of it."

"I shouldn't think so," said Palpatine. "It's a Sith legend, not something you could learn from a Jedi. Darth Plagueis, you see, was a Dark Lord of the Sith. A mystic, and a true devotee of the Force and all its endless permutations. For a hundred years, the legend goes, he meditated on the planet Dagobah in an attempt to discern the will of the Force. When at last he emerged from his trance he was transformed, his powers increased a hundredfold. He had discovered the secret to eternal life, plumbed the deepest mysteries of its ebb and flow. Legend tells that he had become so powerful he could even create life, pulling order from the chaos of the Living Force.

"Like all Sith, he eventually took an apprentice, and when he had taught his apprentice everything he knew, like all Sith, his apprentice killed him in his sleep. It's a fable I heard often as a young boy. My mother was a scholar at Theed University and thought ambitious children ought to know the dangers of real knowledge." He allowed himself a faint smile. "Imagine such a thing. To cheat death, to save the ones we love from its embrace..."

"Death is a natural part of life," said Anakin. "All we can do is accept it."

He knows the boy does not believe. It was plain on his face. "Jedi dogma," said Palpatine. "Man transcends. He does not submit."

The rest of the ballet passed in silence. When it was over Anakin stood, still troubled. "Good evening, Chancellor," he said.

"A moment, Anakin," said Palpatine. Outside the privacy screen the Galaxy's potentates began to filter out of the Mon Bannu. "I'd like a word with you. Not now. Next week. Stop by the Rotunda and we'll meet concerning your appointment to the Council."

"Thank you, Chancellor," said Anakin. He left, a shadow on the darkened mezzanine. Palpatine watched him leave, watched Kenobi slip out of Organa's box and move to intercept. They spoke briefly, then Anakin shook his head and swept past the older man and out of the Sonorium. Kenobi remained a moment longer before he too made his exit.

Near midnight the lights in the opera house went out. Madam Ackbar knew better than to ask the Chancellor when he would be leaving, and so Palpatine sat in the dark, free for a few hours from the constant storm of aides, press briefings, appointments and war councils. He ran a hand through his thick white hair and sighed.

_It's nearly over._


	3. Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE: SERENNO

RUNE

The Twin Suns Luxury Towers. In a galaxy ripped apart by civil war it seemed there could be no less likely redoubt for the militant Confederate leadership than a former playground for the obscenely wealthy. Rune Haako, Viceroy of the Trade Federation and senior member of the Leadership Council, was not like other Neimoidians. Oh, he had played the games his people played. Ever since the creche he had fought, schemed, hoarded and groveled for the slightest advantage. Greed was a almost a religion on Neimoidia. Still, though, even as he'd planted knives in the backs of the males and females between himself and power, his conscience had insisted on maintaining a constant, irritating presence. _Don't kill her, Rune! Don't let the people starve, Rune! Wait for the crowd to clear before telling your pilot to ignite the engines, Rune!_

It was endless, interminable. And then had come the invasion of Naboo, that great effort to strangle the galaxy's trade routes into submission to the Federation. Greedy Nute had overreached himself and paid dearly for it. Rune Haako, the cautious voice of reason, had barely escaped with his life. For sixteen hours he had sweated beside the mangled Darth Maul in the cockpit of Nute's shuttle, praying for his life to whatever gods would listen. Nute was dead, Maul was dead, the monster Grievous executed, but Rune remained. Now, on the balcony of his lavish apartment in the complex's southern tower, he watched Coruscant die.

It was not the war they had been promised, that night in Dooku's penthouse suite. It was not the glorious revolution the Count had told them to expect. True, some worlds had taken up the Confederate banner with rousing cheers and raised arms, but more had flinched beneath the lash of galactic conquest. Cities living second lives as smoldering craters, the grasses of Hypori pounded into rugged hills of glass by turbolaser fire, dead heaped for burning on a hundred thousand nameless worlds. Breadlines on Coruscant, posters on every wall and leaflets raining from the sky to clog the sewers and the minds of every citizen. Rune passed a hand over his perspiring face. _This isn't what I paid for. Nute, what did you get us into?_

"It's a beautiful night, no?"

Rune turned. Wat Tambor, the Foreman of the Techno Union, stood in the doorway leading back into his privacy-screened suite. The Skakoan wore an air filtration mantle that obscured his mouth and upper body, along with safety goggles to shield his eyes from corrosive elements in the atmosphere and a long purple robe of synthetic rish-velvet. He joined Rune at the rail, putting his gloved hands on the night-chilled metal.

"Quite," said Rune sourly.

"Lord Sidious's communication is due to begin any minute now," said Wat. The Skakoan's eyes were dark, wet and unreadable behind his goggles. "San, Archduke Poggle and and I wondered if you might join us for the address."

_What a lovely idea, _thought Rune, the edge of his lipless mouth twisting into a sneer. _What an absolutely spectacular way to spend the rest of the evening. I wonder what inventive new ways Sidious has contrived to deepen the Galaxy's loathing for us. _"Of course," he said. He was, after all, the ranking representative of the Confederacy's most powerful member corporation, and appearances had to be preserved. "It would be my pleasure."

The complex's Grand Atrium was a yawning abyss of a conference space, a shaft sixty floors high ringed with endless galleries, its support pillars decorated with glowing holosculptures, its ground floor a dizzying mosaic of reactive tiles that appeared different from each viewing station. On the eighteenth floor Rune, San Hill, Wat Tambor, and Poggle the Lesser watched the myriad thousands of high-ranking Confederate diplomats, noblemen, officers, and industrialists assembling in their finest dress. The rumble of their conversation echoed in the depths of the shaft, resounding from the great holo-screens suspended by repulsors in midair.

"My informants say Lord Sidious's address will be of particular import tonight," said San, resting his elbows on the rail and steepling his long, thin fingers beneath his chin. "I really cannot recommend the Bothans too highly."

_Pretentious shitheel, _thought Rune, scowling. Before he could respond with some suitably bland compliment, though, the holo-screens fizzed to life. At once, chill silence dropped like a stone into the pool of muttering potentates. The Sith Lord's countenance, fifty feet high and drowned as always in shadow, swam into view. Rune froze. He knew it was illogical, knew it was just the reptilian stub of his hindbrain writhing madly in the electric blue light of the hologram, but still the fear caught at him with its sharp, barbed little claws. _He knows my thoughts. _Spastic, Rune gripped at the collar of his dress robes. His scalp itched beneath his ceremonial miter.

"My noble associates," came the Sith Lord's mellifluous voice. "My colleagues, my friends. We stand closer now to our final victory than we have ever been. Our struggle, our ceaseless efforts in the prosecution of this war against injustice, is nearly at an end. Four months from today, this very day, we shall crush the perfidious Republic, end its tyrannical reign, and establish the government this galaxy deserves! No longer will bureaucrats hand down laws from on high! No longer will the jackboots of the clone soldiers be heard in the streets!"

There were cheers from the balconies, cries of support and eager enthusiasm. Glasses of alcohol, hydrogen-slurry, granulated protein liquor, were raised by grasping hands and tentacles. The hooded countenance swept the room with its stare. "We must be stringent in our preparations," said the projection. "We must strengthen our resolve, harden our hearts against the horrors of this bitter war. Only with the full power of our alliance can we hope to lance the festering boil that is the Republic. Four months from today we will stand together on the steps of the Senate Rotunda! The Jedi will fall! The Senate will fall! The Grand Army of the Republic will be as water in the wind! This, I swear!"

Rune caught sight of Count Dooku at the center of a veritable swarm of aides, attaches and hangers-on, Poggle the Lesser at his elbow. The Count of Serenno did not join in the tempestuous applause. He stood at the rail of his private gallery box, a glass of wine in one hand, the other behind his back. He looked...odd. Angry, perhaps. It was so hard to gauge the emotions of humans. Rune scratched at his throat where the collar of his ceremonial robes was chafing in the heat. Sidious had actually promised to appear in person. _After so many years, we finally see the man._

The towering hologram's hooded countenance turned, silent amidst the acclaim, and for a moment its eyes seemed to pierce Rune's. He froze, his mouth dry, fear clutching his throat with an iron grasp. Sidious knew him. He felt it in that single, endless instant. The Sith Lord's reach was too long to avoid, his knowledge infinite. If he wished he could reach out across the gulf of space and crush Rune like a sher-grub, leave him twitching in his own fluid.

"I say," said San, wringing his spidery hands in delight. "This is it, my friends. My shareholders, yourselves included, will be most relieved."

Wat Tambor nodded in satisfaction as the hologram dissolved, but Rune felt only a cold, wet fear chewing at the pit of his stomach. It was the same unreasoning terror he'd felt when Nute had first struck his bargain with the Sith. _He fucked us that day, and he's never stopped fucking me. Even dead, you rotten greedy bastard._ "Yes," he managed, clearing his throat. "Yes, quite the relief."

The applause went on and on.

ANAKIN

It should have gone perfectly. If not for Dooku's blind luck and that clone bitch's interference, it would have. Anakin sat alone in the Jedi Temple's lowest meditation chamber, trying to shed the frustration that clung to his skin like the smell of stale sweat. The war was killing him, prying with gnarled hands at his defenses. Every moment of every day he felt without surcease the clangor of a trillion bent and fearful minds, the clawing terror of a planet enveloped in bloody conflict. Every death was a slap to the face, every injury a new knot in the pit of his stomach. He drank little, ate less. Often he went without sleep until the world around him blended into a vast, seamless wasteland of concurrent events. All things were one grey pulse, the Living Force a clotted river of petty emotion and pain.

_I am a drop of water._

Anakin squeezed his eyes shut and ground his palms against them, relinquishing as much as he had ever been able his connection to the Force. It was like cramming his ears and mouth with cotton, like pulling a hood over his eyes. He could sense the Force's presence, but it was muffled. Distant. Best to shut it away when he felt this way. Best to retreat, for a while.

"Disturbed, you are."

Anakin turned quickly, concentration lost. Yoda stood in the meditation chamber's doorway, a wizened figure shrouded in brown robes. Some of his paradoxical youth had faded during the war's long, bloody course. He no longer smiled so often, and the wrinkles in his greenish skin were deeper than they had been. Still, though, his air of warmth and kindness remained. "I'm sorry, Master," said Anakin automatically. He felt a faint stirring of shame at being caught without his mask in place, at letting another see his turmoil. He manufactured a smile, seizing the Force in an iron grip.

"Apologize to me, do not," said Yoda. He hobbled into the room, leaning heavily on his knobby walking stick. Jedi and root seemed equally gnarled, equally bent by the years. "A heavy burden, yours is. Tax you, it does."

"Not so heavy as yours, Master," said Anakin. "I have no right to complain." _I am a freak._

Yoda settled cross-legged on a mat facing Anakin. "Time there is, always, for sorrow, young Skywalker," he said, closing his eyes. "Make certain, though, that overcome you it does not."

"Yes, Master." Anakin stood, but Yoda raised a clawed hand.

"A moment, wait," said the ancient Master. "Speak, we should."

Anakin sat again, concealing his frustration. He clasped his hands together inside the wide sleeves of his robes. The city-planet raged around him. The Confederates were embroiled in a skirmish with a clone battalion near the Kuwat Driveyards branch headquarters, just outside the Senatorial District. They weren't using droids. Regular troops, recruits from rebel worlds or press-ganged soldiers fighting with shock collars on their throats. The carnage was terrible.

Yoda's eyes opened. "I sense much fear in you."

"It isn't mine, Master," said Anakin. "The war..."

"Ah, yes," said Yoda, nodding. "Heavy upon all our minds this war weighs. A terrible thing it is, and cloaked in shadow. Close to the Living Force are you, young Skywalker. Each death you feel, as I do. Each atrocity, at your heart eats. But despair not. There is no death."

"I'm trying, Master Yoda," said Anakin. The Force pressed hard against his temples, surging black and wild there, crying out in a million, billion voices. He saw blood and fire, worlds burning in the void, whole peoples lamenting their fates. He saw Qui-Gon die. He saw Obi-Wan die. Palpatine, Padmé, his children. He sat stiff and silent, and the Force raged in him.

"There is no death," repeated Yoda. He closed his eyes again.

Anakin rose and left the room. The halls of the Temple, refurbished after Grievous's brutal assault, were almost empty. So many miles of twining marble, home to a decrepit order mired in politics and war. Anakin walked aimlessly through the labyrinth. He came to a halt by a tall, narrow window, and looking out over the ravaged city-planet he thought of the Council chamber, of that great circular room at the center of the Temple's highest tower. He would sit there in conclave with Yoda, with Ki-Adi Mundi, with Obi-Wan. It brought hot, bitter joy to think of it. A seat in the Council, something even Qui-Gon never had. His gloved hand, the false one, formed a fist.

"Anakin."

He turned, joy fading. Obi-Wan walked up to stand at his side. His old Master's bearded face was haggard, his eyes underscored by dark circles. "I wanted to speak to you, Anakin."

"About what, Master?" The words burned in his throat.

Obi-Wan scratched his bearded chin. "We haven't seen one another recently. I understand you've been working closely with the Chancellor's office, and I've been with the 488th in the Menari district, off-planet handling Ryloth's repatriation, a dozen other cursed things. For good or ill this war will be over soon. I have had to accept many...many losses." Obi-Wan's voice faltered, and for a moment something of their old closeness hung between them as the bearded Jedi let his control falter, let his pain show. It passed quickly. Obi-Wan blinked, looking down at the cityscape outside the Temple precincts. "I would not want for our friendship to be one of them."

"I don't know what you mean, Master."

Obi-Wan gave him a worried look. "I mean that we see very little of one another."

"The war is taxing," Anakin said. He clasped his hands behind his back. In the distance blooms of fire described a duel between a CSS dreadnought and a Republic _Venator_-class Star Destroyer. In low orbit the crashes were disastrous, each one a fresh genocide. Anakin felt death uncoiling around the great ships. He closed himself off, shut the pain away. "We haven't had much opportunity."

"I'd like that to change," said Obi-Wan, offering a tired smile. "I have-"

"It _will _change, Master," said Anakin, unable to keep the smile entirely from his face. "The Chancellor has appointed me to the Council, as his liaison."

Obi-wan stared. His brow furrowed. "The Council appoints its own."

"Not this time," said Anakin, and with that he turned his back on Obi-Wan and strode away down the echoing hall. He felt better. Stronger. More alive.

In control.

PADME

There was someone in the apartment. Someone other than their old Ithorian nursemaid, Nuodo. Padmé stood in the doorway, security clearance card in hand, still wearing the ball gown the Bothan ambassador had given her as a gift. The pit of her stomach churned with a sort of nauseous premonition. She cleared her throat, which was suddenly dry. "Nuodo?"

"No," came the cool, sonorous reply from the darkened common room. "No, madam senator, I'm afraid not."

_He sounds exactly like he does on the holonet._

The locking mechanism on the front door slid home of its own accord as the common room's lights flicked on, illuminating dimly the elderly man standing by the privacy-screened window. Count Dooku looked older in person, careworn and weary, but dignified. Distinguished. In the crook of his arm he held Padmé's sleeping daughter. Shmi, wrapped in a red thermal blanket, stirred sleepily. The infant girl clutched at Dooku's cape with a chubby fist.

"Please," said Padmé, her heartbeat thundering in her ears. She tasted dust, ashes. The world spun around her. "She has nothing to do with this."

"Her potential is enormous, you know," said the Count. Silhouetted against the darkened window he seemed more apparition than man, his silver hair ghostly in the murk. "Her brother's also. Young Qui-Gon was well-named."

Padmé tried to swallow, tried to breathe. "Where is he?"

"Sleeping," said Dooku in his oil-and-honey voice. "Force-sensitive children inhabit a different world. They require a great deal of rest. As did you, I'm sure."

Padmé adopted the cold, masklike expression she typically reserved for state speeches. "You have always been an honorable opponent," she said. Her mouth was dry, her muscles loose and trembling. She tasted bile, swallowed, forced herself to keep speaking. _One chance to play both ends against the middle. I have to take it._ "Please."

"You can relax, Senator," said the Count. "I respect your office, I respect your person. I am not General Grievous. You and your children are safe. Please, take a seat."

Padmé crossed the room and sat on the long, low Naboo-style couch along the room's east wall. Her heart was still thudding in her ears, but she was in control. The mask was in place. "What do you want, Dooku?" She smoothed her skirt, forcing a radiant smile.

"A chance at Palpatine," said Dooku. "He _is_ Sith, you know. Darth Sidious, Lord of Betrayal. He has directed this war's every step, subverted its principles through graft, through blackmail, through simony and subtle application of the Force. Now that his designs near completion, he needs me gone. I have no intention of leaving. Your clandestine husband is the arm around which the serpent coils. You, I understand, occupy a position now unique within Skywalker's heart: that of beloved confidante. You are the lynchpin from which the galaxy hangs, Padmé Naberrie."

The sight of Shmi in Dooku's arms still clawed at Padmé's heart, but she swallowed bile and buried her maternal instincts beneath layers of analysis. Palpatine _was_ the Sith Lord, and what reason would Dooku have to lie? "What are you offering me, Count?"

"Your husband is a loyal man, and dangerous, but uncomplicated. He doesn't understand the burdens State can place upon a man's shoulders, or a woman's. He is too close to Palpatine to see that he has fallen under his influence, that he exists now as an extension of the Chancellor's will. In a week's time he will be appointed to the Jedi Council as special liaison to the Chancellor, and then every piece will be in place. This is nearly over, Senator."

"You haven't answered my question."

"It's very simple," said Dooku. He crossed the room to stand before Padmé, Shmi breathing softly in his arms. The Count's dark eyes were wide, sincere. He transferred the sleeping baby to Padmé's arms, then stepped back, turning to the window where a sleek black airspeeder had pulled up and now hung, waiting, repulsors humming. "I'm going to train you. If you agree, meet me in the Memorial Garden in the Rotunda tomorrow night."

The window hissed open at a gesture from Dooku. He stepped out into the night, vanishing into the speeder, which departed with a faint _hiss _of muffled rotors. Padmé sat alone in the apartment, legs shaking so badly she couldn't stand to go and see whether Dooku had left Nuodo alive, or if Qui-Gon was sleeping. She held Shmi close against her breast and when the tears came she tried to keep them quiet.


	4. Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR: _Daritha_

OBI-WAN

Neimoidian mercenaries took potshots at the advancing clones from the cover of a collapsed highrise. Meanwhile, a score of super battle droids directed a withering hail of blaster fire at the mobile deflectors being pushed forward by more of the Republic's men in white. Obi-Wan stood behind the Republic's lines, but he was the center of the conflict. All moments were one, all flesh and circuitry united. In deep Battle Meditation he felt no fear, no pain, only the depthless currents of the Force wrapped tight around him.

The fight for the tenth block of Eske Street was in its second day. The sun hung weak and watery on the gaseous horizon. Obi-Wan was the soldiers pushing forward through fading coils of effervescent plasma. He was the rock-roaches scrambling for cover in the drainage grates. He was the Neimoidians crouched behind their makeshift barriers of rubble, and the lone Geonosian soldier firing its pulse gun from a tilted spar of durasteel leaning out above the street. He was the cold wind, the faint fingers of the dawn, the dying Canthus vine clinging to the pilings beneath the street.

_One of them tried to kill Padmé, _said a quiet voice outside the circle of his contemplation. _You saw his hands, the white armor, the bomb he clipped to the fuel tank._

No time for old mysteries. Obi-Wan set his memories aside and lowered himself deeper into the currents of the Force. Coruscant cried out for succor. Echoes of the wounds in its durasteel skin churned like whirlpools, frothing with black agony. _So many have died, _thought Obi-Wan as he guided the clones forward through the withering hail of blaster and slug fire. A battle droid exploded and Obi-Wan raced through its fuel cells, down its ruined processor pathways.

The surviving mercenaries surrendered before dark. There had been no night on Coruscant before the war had come home; the city-planet's trillion lights had kept the dark at bay. Now, though, whole vert-blocks responsible for distributing power from the thermal dynamos drilled deep into the abandoned surface had been destroyed or cut off from the mega-grid. Mile-wide stretches of the capital were black as pitch. Whole districts boiled in the unregulated heat of high summer while others froze in satellite-enforced winter. Freak thunderstorms came and went without warning.

"Master Jedi," said the Neimoidian commander. Two clones had to help him kneel. "I surrender on behalf of the 455th Confederate infantry." He held out his stun baton. Behind the quivering alien the other Republic soldiers, clones and volunteers both, broke down the deactivated droids.

Obi-Wan took the collapsed baton and weighed it in his hands. "I accept, lieutenant," he said. "You and your soldiers will be treated fairly."

The buzz of approaching LAATs was loud in the sudden silence. On the horizon, plasma flickered and snarled as starships dueled in the stratosphere and against the unlit hulk of a distant palace complex little pulses of light signaled a clash between Republic and CIS forces, unless it was between some of the innumerable gangs that had sprung up out of the chaos. Huge mobs of migrants swarmed the understories like entire civilizations turned suddenly nomad, fighting for shelter, for access to heat and hydroponics domes. Obi-Wan could feel their anger and desperation like a slow, erratic pulse set against his own.

One atrocity after another, piece by bloody piece, the planet was losing its mind.

The Jedi Temple was no longer the bastion of calm and clarity it had once been. Grievous's rampage through its halls had put an end to that illusion. Now, as Obi-Wan crossed the battle-scarred concourse beneath the vaulted ceiling, he felt the loss of his childhood haven keenly. Coruscant had never mattered to him, but the Temple had been his only home from the age of eight. He passed a hand over his face and noticed, for the first time, his skinned knuckles. He sighed. _When did that happen?_

"Obi-Wan." It was Mace, walking brusquely toward him across the polished floor. Padawans, Knights, and visitors cleared a path for the bald, dark-skinned Master. He fell into step beside Obi-Wan, his high-collared brown robe billowing behind him. "I'm glad I caught you before the session. Have you heard?"

"Heard what?" Obi-Wan often felt slow after immersing himself in Battle Meditation, unable to cope with conversation or Temple intrigue. "I've been out with the 45th."

Mace looked grim as they stopped, waiting for a lift car near the end of the hall. "Anakin," he said, his tone heavy with regret and anger.

They rode the lift in silence. Obi-Wan remembered another ride, years before, with Qui-Gon at his side. What he wouldn't give for another hour of his Master's calming influence, his sage council and even-tempered manner. _You'd know what to do with Anakin, _he thought, half wistful and half frustrated. _You'd say something about the Living Force and take whatever it is that's eating him out of his heart, and he'd never even know you'd done it._

The lift doors slid open. Mace stepped out into the Council Chamber and Obi-Wan followed, trying to master his dread. The Council was at quorum, five members in attendance with himself and Mace included, but at Yoda's left hand on a plain boma-wood bench, dressed in a smart black robe and leggings, sat Anakin. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his skin looked sallow, but he wore a look of deep satisfaction on his handsome face. Yoda, seated beside him, looked older and wearier, than usual, and the many empty seats in the round made him look smaller than he was.

Obi-Wan stood on the threshold of the round, struck dumb by exhaustion and a deep, raw sense of loss. He'd thought Palpatine's move to place Anakin on the Jedi Council a bluff, but it seemed the Chancellor had pulled the trigger. _Where will he stop? We already lead his soldiers. We mediate his treaties, enforce his laws... _Obi-Wan closed his eyes, succumbing for an instant to the rigors of the past decade of his life. One war after another, catastrophe after catastrophe, whole worlds dying, the Force fraying at its roots until the whole Galaxy seemed one wild, continuous shriek of distress.

"Master Kenobi." His former apprentice's voice cut through his sorrow and weariness. "Are you going to join us?"

"Yes," said Obi-Wan, unable to keep the bite of bitter recrimination from his voice. Before the war no Master would have dared to show such naked aggression toward another, but they were a fallen order, a ragged band of monks clinging to their ideals by the skin of their teeth. Obi-Wan crossed the floor where once Anakin had stood for assessment, and he took his seat.

"Begun, the council has," Yoda said. "What business today concerns us?"

"The Menari District remains under firm Separatist control," said Mace. "The 488th has faltered in its attempts to provide ground support for aerial raids. If we're going to throw them off of this planet, we're going to need to recommit."

Anakin waved his gloved prosthetic hand. "The 501st has been assigned to the Menari district," he said. "They'll get it done."

"Under whose command?" Plo Koon asked, his vox-filtered voice rough.

"Mine," said Anakin, smug. He crossed his legs. "The Chancellor wants the district flushed. We threaten their command center, we get them to commit to a decisive battle. The big push comes in a little under four months."

Silence slammed down on the five assembled councilors. The others were in the field. Ki-Adi, Master Fisto, Agen Kolar, Master Rancisis, Master Piell... The Jedi Order was thinned, a living representation of the gutted Council Chamber. Obi-Wan felt the prospect of a grand counteroffensive deep in the pit of his stomach. How many would die? _And a 501__st__ Senatorial legion. The cloners pocket more credits, close their grip on our security even tighter. _He still had nightmares, sometimes, of the sterile halls of the Kaminoan cloning complexes where he'd seen millions of Jango Fetts drilling in lockstep, millions more jogging along tracks in ten-year-old bodies, millions more hanging pale and fetal in amniotic quickgro tanks.

Obi-Wan thought of the Neimoidian officer who'd surrendered to him just a few hours before. What would happen to Neimoidia, that swampy, dingy planet if the Republic triumphed? Would it follow Duros, fusion-bombed into irreparable pollution and chaos? Would Palpatine exercise vengeance, or justice? Obi-Wan tried to read the answer in his one-time apprentice's face, or in his deep presence in the Force, but there was only the faint smile on Anakin's lips and a slick, heavy sense of triumph coiled around his heart.

DOOKU

He waited, sitting cross-legged in the Memorial Garden in the shadow of Qui-Gon's statue, one of the many erected in tribute to the war's valorous dead. The senate's remaining members didn't frequent the garden, and anyone who came too close found themselves suddenly overcome by the certainty that they should be elsewhere. Dooku was just beginning to wonder whether or not the woman would come when he sensed her entering the atrium.

She came reluctantly, full of fear, full of self-loathing. That was good. Dooku shifted. He had foregone his usual dark suit and half-cape; instead he wore a loose-fitting black robe and vest that suited his mood better. He felt old. His hair was uncombed, his beard untrimmed. Flitting avians buzzed between flowers, their brightly-colored feathers shimmering in the dim lighting. A knee-height stone fountain burbled away in the shadow of Qui-Gon's statue.

Padmé Naberrie stood in turmoil at the grotto's edge. Dooku dipped a cupped hand into the fountain, raised it, and drank. "Sit," he said, gesturing to the bench opposite his.

Her discomfiture at seeing him, the notorious traitor, in the center of her idyllic little government was satisfying in the extreme. Dooku allowed himself a smile. She sat. She was, the Count reflected, very lovely. Even harried and conflicted she presented an outwardly unruffled countenance to the world. Red gown, trailing sleeves, topaz choker, hair styled into a sleek, oiled knot. Her slender neck reminded him of Asajj's, and there his inspection ended.

The senator's emotions, while open to an adept of the Force, were not entirely unguarded, either. _Had she been born poor the Order would have snatched her from her cradle, _Dooku mused. His own mother had fought his father's decision to offer him up for training, had fought it tooth and nail in Serenno's courts, and then in the Republic's. In the end, though, they had taken the old Count's heir away at the tender age of four to be trained in that echoing mausoleum on Coruscant. "Good evening, madam senator," Dooku said.

Padmé said nothing. She looked like a cornered animal, tense and ready to bolt at the first whiff of trouble. _She must know she would never leave this alcove. _He could see it now, the lightsaber slashing that white throat, the ruby droplets of blood steaming on the tiles. He had always been made of sterner stuff than other men; he had always been willing to do what needed doing. He dipped his hand into the fountain and drank from it. The water was cold and clean, another ridiculous extravagance for the Senate's toadies while Coruscant starved. "Someone has taught you how to shield your thoughts, madam senator."

She said nothing. Her brown eyes met his, though, and they were full of cold fire.

Dooku shook droplets of water from his veined and spotted hand. _When did I become so old? _ "Who was your instructor? Let me see if I can remember my Naboo court politics..." He pursued his lips and pretended to think while probing at the senator's mind, assessing her defenses. They were impressive, for a novice. "It couldn't have been that fool Queen Palpatine's animal bisected. She was only a child. Naboo always has been caught up in its own youthful idealism.

"Not Panaka; plenty of discipline, but no patience for mysticism. Bibble struck me as more of an empty suit stuffed with principles, and your family hasn't a hint of potential. So...it must have been Master Shenka. Court Jedi, twelve twenty-three to twelve sixty-six."

He could see he'd gotten it right in the way she set her jaw. Teti Shenka, a veteran of the Order's old guard, had died in one of the CIS bombing runs on Duro.

"Yes," Padmé bit out.

Dooku shrugged. "She did a shoddy job."

Anger. No sign on the face, but the ripples in the Force were unmistakable. Dooku savored that taste; he had trouble mustering rage at will, a block that had slowed his training for years. "The Jedi believe that the body must be controlled, that emotions must be shackled, that self-discipline is everything." He touched the jewel-bright minds of the avians flitting all around him, compelling them to fly in serried ranks. Padmé's eyes followed them. Dooku let them go and they dispersed, rattled. "It has some merit. The undisciplined mind is weak, but discipline does not always mean self-denial.

"Do you love your children?"

It was an old challenge, part of the litmus test for potential Sith acolytes already burdened with progeny. He felt her answer, a tangled skein of love, fear, suspicion, and belligerence. Her eyes flashed. "Yes."

"You would do anything for them."

The first tremor of uncertainty cracked her stately mask. He saw Anakin in her, the madman around which luminaries like Qui-Gon and Palpatine hung their hopes. She swallowed. "I would."

"That is of the Sith." He hoped Skywalker had not infected her with his schizophrenic rage, his pathological inability to channel his potential. "Love is strength, not weakness. The anger you feel now...you want to kill me.

"Good."

He drew his unlit lightsaber with a flick of his wrist. The curved hilt fit his palm as naturally as though it had always been there. "Would you like to try?" He flipped the hilt and offered it to her, butt first. "I won't tell you that my death means the end of the war, nor will I tell you that the defeat of the CIS would serve any purpose except, inevitably, to further Palpatine's agenda. Nevertheless, I have coerced you here and feel compelled to offer you a chance to vent your spleen."

The fountain gurgled. Padmé stared at him, never once looking at the lightsaber. Hate bubbled behind her flushed face. She threw herself at him. He'd never have guessed she'd try it, but he was ready nonetheless. He threw himself sideways and summoned up the Force, wrapping himself in its thunderous eddies and currents as Padmé hit the bench and spun to face him, fear blooming in her heart. He wrapped her throat in bands of steel.

"This is your first lesson," he said as she rose up from the ground at his silent command, her delicate feet kicking at nothing, her hands clawing at her throat. "Your death is never further away than my displeasure."

He dropped her and she crumpled to the floor, coughing and wheezing, her face red. Another burst of will flipped her over onto her back. Dooku flung against the base of Qui-Gon's statue with a gesture and kept her pinned there, his hand outstretched. "I can walk into the Senate Round unquestioned," he said. It was not a boast. "Believe that your apartment represents no challenge to my powers." He released his grip on the Force. "Tomorrow you will meet me in district 9-12 outside an establishment called The One-Eared Vrelt at half past midnight. We will discuss your future.

"Am I understood?"

She stood, shaky and disheveled, fear and despair writhing inside her. "I understand," she spat out at last. "What should I tell-"

"I haven't the faintest idea," said Dooku, smiling. He returned his lightsaber to his sleeve and turned his back on the senator. "Think on hatred, madam senator. I'll expect you at the Vrelt."

He left by the grand stair, reaching out with the Force to quell curious looks and blooming fear in the clones and senators he met there. To them, he was just another old human; they did not apprehend his true nature.

Dooku of Serenno was the first raindrop heralding the storm that was to come.

JANGO

Something was wrong. He had hands, but they were not his hands. He checked them, when the cameras focused on someone else. The weathered palms, the scarred knuckles, the pronounced veins just beneath his olive skin. Those things were right, but the hands were wrong. The voices agreed. They whispered that someone had stolen his real hands, that someone was to blame, that the food at the table was poisoned and Boba was a machine set to watch him, or else his beloved son, defenseless in the Republic's crumbling embrace. Now, dressed in full Mandalorian battle kit and standing behind the Chancellor on the central podium of the Senate Rotunda, Jango Fett considered his surroundings. How had he come so far so quickly? It made no sense. He remembered Tyranus, no, Dooku(they were the same man), recruiting him, remembered the operating room on Kamino and, later, the tanks full of (not him). The Chancellor was giving a speech. Jango listened.

"...with great reluctance accept the responsibilities thrust upon my person by this Republic's dire predicament. We stand upon the brink, my friends, and our enemy prepares for a clash that will surely ruin one or both of us. What can we do but fight on? What hope is there but unity, but strength, but unflinching commitment to the ideals of this Republic! We will fight on, we will persevere, and we will never surrender to tyranny!"

More executive powers. More troops recruited, and (made). More rights revoked, and always the creeping progress of pro-human, pro-male legislation pushed forward by Senators like Kuwat of Kuwat, Senators like Aldar Dreyn of Corellia, like Wislaw Coriolanus of Fondor. All the great industrialists cheering Palpatine onward, onward, onward(to the graveyard where the Mandalores are buried side by side, their empty armor the last ruined rags of their grandeur). Jango scowled behind his war-mask. Muscles moved in his face, but they were not his muscles. It was not his face.

Palpatine's weathered countenance, transmitted system-wide via holonet and displayed on every mural-screen on Coruscant, bows in mournful reverence. "Let us not forget the brave troops who give their lives for our safety," he intoned, clasping his wrinkled hands. He wore a robe of black brocade with bloused red sleeves and a high collar. It made him look like one of the carrion-eating reptavians Jango had seen when he'd (died) on Tattooine.

"May the Force be with our soldiers," Palpatine said. Transmissions cut out. The ceremonial acceptance of the vote to extend Palpatine's term finally came to an end and the central podium was descending toward the iris in the Senate floor that led back to the Chancellor's outer office. The iris cycled open, durasteel teeth parting. Discontent in the Senate was widespread. Senators watched the Chancellor's speech with sullen expressions, and if the loyalists were cheering louder than ever before, the silence from the rest was deafening. Empty seats, scars on the body politic, drew attention to the thousands of worlds that had withdrawn from the Republic. Jango watched the angry faces of the Senators pass by. Bothans, Ithorians, Talz, Nikto, Gran, and numberless others.

The podium sank through the open iris, disengaged its repulsors and met its docking station with a hiss of hydraulics. Palpatine, followed by Mas Amedda, stepped off onto the tiled floor, two red-robed guardsmen falling into line to his either side. Jango watched them, wondering if one of them was his real self. How many times had he seen (not his) face on the holonet, or in the vids? He stood abandoned in the outer office, forgotten by Palpatine and his retinue. He took off his helmet, ran someone else's hand through someone else's hair. He was not himself, but the armor was his.

The voices told him to kill Amedda, to kill Boba, to kill the Senators, to murder the clones and the Jedi and every Rodian female he could find and to write True Things in their blood on the steps of the Senate, but he restrained himself. Instead, he sat down on the podium and let his helmet roll away across the floor. He held his head in his hands, praying that when the war was over he would be allowed to die.

(How many times have I died already?)

In his apartment, or someone else's, Boba was doing figures at his desk in the stark, spare room Jango had assigned him. A son had to be strong, and strength came from privation. Jango watched his clone (himself? Another man's son?) from the doorway, unnoticed. He felt a deep, aching love for the boy, but he feared him. He feared everything. The diodes on the grav lift, the ship people said was his (who would name a ship Slave?), his armor, the coarse dark hair on his chest and his arms. In his own room, a bare-walled cell furnished only with a refresher and a military cot, Jango stripped off his polished kit, his disarmed jetpack, his ceremonial pistols. He was a false Mandalorian, a puppet Mandalore for a dead race of men who'd been noble, who'd stood for something. He dropped down onto his cot and put his head in his hands, breathing (with someone else's lungs).

"Dad?" came Boba's voice from the doorway.

Jango looked up. His clone was watching him, concern in his (their) eyes. "Go to bed, Boba," he said dully. "We'll practice your stances in the morning."

"I've been having bad dreams."

Palpatine, the lightsaber blazing to crimson life in his hands, blood running from his broken nose, Jango's own wrists hacked through in a searing wash of pain and then light, light, and the water closing over-

-nothing.

Jango looked at his son. "Go to bed," he said. "Warriors don't have bad dreams."

ANAKIN

Anakin lay beside Padmé in their bed, his arms around her. Her dreams were bad tonight, bad enough to poison the air in their bedroom and keep Anakin from sleep. He had tried to shut her out, but his own defenses were too brittle, and he was too attuned to her. He'd tried meditation, but the forge-fire at his center defeated him in that, too. He was a stripped wire, a raw nerve. Only his makeshift sheathe of absolute control kept his wife's nightmares, and Coruscant's, from becoming his own.

He sat up and ran his flesh-and-blood hand through his short brown hair. Padmé stirred in her sleep, sweat standing out on her brow. He left her in their bed and went out into the common area. _It feels cold, _he thought as he poured himself a finger of Corellian brandy from the sideboard. His stump ached and his artificial fingers twitching involuntarily. He took his drink out onto their privacy-screened and shielded balcony. The city-planet stretched out smearily beyond the barrier, a haphazard pattern of light and dark expressed in hive-like tenement sprawls, the soaring towers of the affluent, the smoking factories that drove the Grand Army's war machine.

Somewhere out there was Dooku, the Rancor lurking at the heart of the Confederate threat. Anakin suppressed his fury at having missed his chance to kill the traitor, to make Palpatine proud, to avenge the Order... _The Order. They're spying on the Chancellor; they scorn my Council seat. I have to keep my wife, my children a secret from them. What do I owe them? _He sipped his drink and thought of Obi-Wan, of meditating together atop a windswept pylon near Coruscant's southern pole, of their six-month trek through the fungal forests of Felucia, the practice duels they'd fought on the Temple proving grounds with cheering Padawans looking on, the pride he'd felt when Obi-Wan had cut his Padawan's braid and declared him a Jedi Knight.

Then the war had begun and the bitter arguments had begun. Obi-Wan had discovered Anakin's secret, his hidden family, and everything had spiraled into a nasty vortex of resentment. Anakin sipped his brandy. The world beat against his shell, howling and clawing, eager to sink spit-slick teeth into his sanity. He held it back with his buckling will. He could feel his children dreaming sweet, small dreams in their cradle. They slept together, brow to brow, their world safe and quiet. The distant strobing flashes of turbolaser fire, dulled to silence by the apartment's shielding, were worlds away. Anakin finished his drink, closed his eyes, and then smashed the glass against the railing.

His comlink chimed while he was picking shards of glass out of his hand. _The Chancellor requests your presence in his office, _it read. _Please attend at earliest convenience._

Anakin wiped his bloody hand on his robe and went inside to change.


	5. Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE: Mace

ANAKIN

The flight to the Rotunda was brief, the cityscape below black and silent. Palpatine's secretary, Roganda, let Anakin into the Chancellor's offices. They were deserted, the holo-displays around the desk dead and silent. Busts of obscure men and women, figures out of the Republic's shrouded past, watched Anakin with sightless marble eyes as he crossed the polished Netch-wood floor of the antechamber with its wall carvings depicting in bas relief the Tenth Battle of Coruscant when the Republic had retaken its capital from the Sith Empire. The Jedi had led the charge against the Sith Emperor's Palace and, though the Order had been decimated, they had triumphed over their ancient foes. Anakin walked through the familiar tasteful rooms, his eyes heavy with sleep, his thoughts slow.

The journal was plain, bound in black leather, its pages yellowing around the edges. It lay open on its first page and the neat, orderly Arabesh handwriting of its author stood out bold against the aging paper. Anakin moved to the lip of the desk and looked down at the journal. It looked so odd and out of place in the Chancellor's sleek, modern office. Almost against his will, Anakin looked down at the first page and began to read. If Palpatine had wanted it kept secret, he would have locked it up.

_Six months on Naboo. The swamps are lovely, if malarial, and at last we've secured a suitable specimen, a human slave girl I bought off of Trandoshan pirates using the ruins of Bunut Gunga as a smuggling base. She has survived our initial experiments and conceived without insemination. We haven't had such a rousing success since the Twi'Lek twins, and they died before coming to term. Shmi's health is excellent, though. Master Plagueis is excited._

Cold. Anakin felt cold. He could see it clearly, now, the house in the swamp and the dark-haired young man talking to his mother by the window while outside a herd of Faamba lumbered past in the morning mist. His trembling fingers turned the page.

_Ten months. Halfway to term, and longer than either of the Twi'Leks survived. Shmi is ill on and off, but the fetus is healthy and growing fast. Already Lord Plagueis can sense its presence in the Force, and sometimes I think I can as well. I've never known him to be wrong, though I do grow frustrated with his failure to properly instruct me in the methods of the immortality trance. He sleeps often these days, and my instruction has fallen by the wayside since he bestowed my title on me. I am called Sidious now, after an ancient Darth of the Emperor's council. _

_ Thirteen months. Shmi is very sick, but the day is close and now I'm sure I feel the child. Two months remain before she reaches term, and Lord Plagueis is worried. We spend most days in the laboratory with her, meditating to keep her fever down. We've even engaged several physicians from Theed, though of course they'll have to be put to death once this is all over. Plagueis is realizing what I did months ago: we should be working inside the system, not clinging to its fringes. He is too much the mystic, but I have Naboo birth records and documentation. When the time comes I can enter society and make a bid for office. I know I can accomplish great things._

_ Sixteen months. Child and mother are alive. Shmi has named him Anakin, and he is powerful, almost unimaginably so. He does not cry. He seldom sleeps. Lord Plagueis is beside himself. He says that we have secured the triumph of the Sith. He has less time for me than ever, and he refuses to share his notes and holocrons. He means, I think, to keep his secrets from me. Very well. Let him. Treachery, after all, is the way of the Sith._

Anakin felt hot tears course down his cheeks.

_ Thirty-seven months. Anakin is growing fast. Just yesterday Lord Plagueis felt him touch the Force, though he confided in me that he suspects the Force may touch Anakin of its own accord. The implications are stupendous. The boy has taken a liking to me, and so I am once again indispensable to Plagueis. Without me Anakin is willful and unfocused, but in my presence he can be shaped and taught with ease. My own unique connection to the Force, it seems, interacts with his in a favorable manner. He has begun to love me, and I confess I am won over. He is a charming child._

_ Thirty-eight months. Plagueis has given me his notes and his own personal instruction. Anakin's development continues apace._

_ Thirty-nine months. I have contracted the Trandoshans for an assault on the house. The time has come for an end to Plagueis's hermetic absurdities. I must have unfettered access to Anakin, and time to perfect the techniques my Master has taught me._

_ Forty months. Disaster. I am undone. My Master is dead by my hand, his manse destroyed, but the Trandoshans cannot find Shmi and her son. Suspecting treachery, I slew every slaver I could find, but when I arrived in Bunut Gunga I found their ships vanished, their bases abandoned. This is the end of Plagueis's grand experiment, and a crippling setback to my own research. _

_ Fuck the slavers and their idiocy. _

"They stole you, of course," said Palpatine. He stood in the doorway, hands clasped together, looking old and worn. "I was young, and stupid to trust in the word of slavers."

Anakin let the journal fall from his hands. There was a ringing in his ear. "What does this mean?" he heard himself say. "What is this? I was born on Tatooine." His voice broke.

"No, Anakin." Palpatine's smile was tired. "No."

The furnace inside Anakin cracked. Volcanic fury boiled out. His lightsaber was in his hand before he knew it. Three feet of sapphire plasma snapped into existence with a furious _hiss _of boiling air. "You're Sith. You're the one the Council is looking for." White-hot anger made his skin itch. He felt as though he would burst into flame at any second, as though his brain would fry, as though his false arm would melt into slag. The raw blaster scar on his left cheek ached horribly. "Did you start this war?" Fear rattled like a swarm of daggerflies in his belly. "Tell me."

The Chancellor's sad smile faded. "Are you going to kill me, Anakin?" He let his hands fall to his side. "You had better decide quickly."

Anakin stepped forward, leveling his lightsaber at the throat of the man who had raised him up from nothing, who had embraced him as a son in front of the whole galaxy and then, in truth, when no one was watching. Blue light washed Palpatine's wrinkled skin, and for an instant Anakin glimpsed something else beneath it. "Did you start the war?" he snarled.

"Yes," said Palpatine. His eyes glowed a dirty, carious yellow in the light of the Jedi weapon. "Yes, I started this war, but to purify the Galaxy, to strengthen it, to end the tyranny of the bureaucrats and the self-righteous arbitration of the Jedi.

"Now," said Palpatine, "Mace Windu and his thugs are on the stairs. Are you with me, or against me? Take a moment to think on it."

Anakin stared at the other man, at the Sith, at his mentor. His heart smoked. His false fingers creaked on his lightsaber's hilt, and he ground his teeth so hard he thought they'd break. Tears leaked from his eyes, hot and bitter.

"Whether you kill me or not, Anakin," Palpatine said, "you've made me very proud."

Anakin swung his lightsaber at the Chancellor's face with a roar of pained anger. The old man's pale blue eyes never left his, never widened the slightest bit. All that Anakin could feel from him was love. He palmed the activator stud and flung the deactivated lightsaber aside. It rolled away across the floor and suddenly he was in Palpatine's arms, folded in a strong embrace, his face buried in the Chancellor's shoulder, and he sobbed until he thought his heart would break.

"There now," Palpatine murmured to him. "Don't fret. You're safe with me."

There were footsteps on the stairs outside the office doors. Anakin clung to his friend like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood, desperate and insensate. Warm, comforting darkness enfolded him like a blanket, smothering the fires that ate at his innards. An endless world of thick, black fog.

"You're safe."

MACE

Mace led Shaak Ti, Eeth Koth, Kit Fisto, Plo Koon, and Saesee Tiin up the steps of the Chancellor's private tower suite. The Rotunda's lights glittered through the clearplast wall on his left, and beyond them were the beacons lighting the Jedi Temple. Palpatine's outer office was deserted, the doors to his inner sanctum closed. Mace paused ten strides from the door, his fellow councilors fanning out around him. He opened himself to the Force and extended his senses, probing beyond the graven bronzium-sheathed doors. Palpatine _was _the Sith he sought. There was no other answer to the puzzle that was the Galactic Civil War.

Beyond the door a swirling darkness waited, a deep well of silent night, a coagulation of the obfuscating gloom that had shrouded the Force throughout the course of the war. Mace looked at Kit Fisto, his oldest friend on the council, and nodded to the Nautolan Jedi. Kit inhaled, head-tentacles squirming, and stretched out a webbed hand toward the door. The heavy plates shifted, grinding in their slots, and then slammed home into the walls. The way was clear. Mace led his comrades on.

_He has to be removed, _he told himself again. _For the Republic. Organa can serve as interim Chancellor while we negotiate a ceasefire and move toward peace._

Mace strode past the Supreme Chancellor's murals and statuary, his brown robe billowing in the dead, filtered air. He drew more deeply on the Force, lowering himself into its gentle eddies, letting himself feel the reality of the world around him. Darkness clung to everything like a lifeless caul, wet and sagging. Mace drew his lightsaber. The others did the same. They passed through the antechamber and emerged into Palpatine's office where the Chancellor sat behind his desk in a high-collared black robe and patterned red stole. He looked up at Mace's entrance.

"Master Windu." The Chancellor sounded frightened.

"Supreme Chancellor Palpatine," said Plo Koon, stepping forward and displaying a holo-warrant, "the Jedi Council finds you under extreme suspicion of graft, fomenting war, ordering assassination without Senatorial approval, and collusion with or involvement in the cult of the Sith. For these charges you will be arrested and held at the Jedi Temple, your office filled by an elected candidate, your personal assets frozen, and your powers suspended."

"The Sith?" Palpatine came to his feet, outrage and confusion warring in his expression. "Corruption? What is this nonsense, Master Windu?"

"The cost of your tyranny is high enough, Palpatine." Mace ignited his lightsaber. The others followed suit, save for Master Koth and Master Tiin, who closed their eyes and prepared themselves to detain the Chancellor with the Force.

"Please," said Palpatine, frantic, "there's been some mistake! Put your weapons away!"

"You are under arrest, Chancellor," said Mace, leveling his violet lightsaber at Palpatine's face. "In the name of the Republic, you are under arrest." He bit the words out through clenched teeth, unable to set aside his anger at what the monster before him had done. The war, the corruption, the endless fields of the dead lying at Palpatine's feet.

"Help!" Palpatine cried. "Guards!" He produced an electrum-plated lightsaber from somewhere in the blink of an eye. The _snap-hiss _as its crimson blade snarled into existence made Mace's blood run cold. "The Jedi are taking over!" He stabbed the lightsaber into the desk-mounted com-recorder, producing a fountain of sparks that lit his weathered face and white hair with a ghoulish radiance. He smiled through the smoke and fire. "That's enough of that, don't you think?"

The desk crushed Tiin before Mace could shift his stance. Eight hundred pounds of polished boma-wood flew across the office and smashed into the Ikotchi Jedi like a runaway bantha. Jedi and desk struck the wall in an explosion of blood and splinters. The others moved, but too slow. Too slow. Palpatine blurred across the intervening space, moving impossibly fast and low to the ground, and suddenly Skywalker was there, too, a black blur wielding a bar of sapphire light. Palpatine cut Eeth Koth down in a spray of pressurized blood, the cut executed so fast it failed to cauterize.

_No, _thought Mace, turning sluggishly to deflect the Sith Lord's thrust. The ruby blade's heat kissed his cheek. _This isn't happening like it should._

Skywalker hammered at Kit's defenses, beating the Nautolan back from the press as Palpatine spun away from Mace to trade blows with Shaak Ti. The Togruta let out a wild battle-cry and swung at the Chancellor with brutal strength. Palpatine turned the blow and his riposte scored her ribs and ignited her robes. She twirled, batting another slash aside as she shrugged out of her smoldering robe in a single fluid motion. In her black singlesuit, gashed at the waist, she fought like a tempest. Palpatine cut her arm off in a spray of sparks, then impaled her through the heart. She fell; Plo spun past her toppling corpse, his sulfurous-yellow lightsaber swinging at Palpatine's face.

The Kel-Dor's head spun through the air, trailing ash and blood. It hit the floor and rolled.

Mace, his heart aching, dashed forward and swung at Palpatine, but the Chancellor danced back with a cruel grin on his pointed face. Behind him, Skywalker had pinned Kit to the wall with a monumental exertion of the Force. Mace could hardly stand to be so close to the Chosen One; it was like standing in a fire. _How did Palpatine turn him? How did I miss this?_

"Anakin, no!" Mace cried.

Anakin looked at him, eyes bloodshot and mouth twisted, and then he plunged his lightsaber up through Kit's chin and into the wall. The Nautolan jerked once, then sagged to his knees, his own weight opening his skull on Skywalker's blade.

PADME

Padmé woke from dark, confusing dreams of blood and betrayal to the sound of the twins wailing in their nursery. By the time she put on her silk dressing robe and slipped inside the warmly-painted room with its toys, its cloth books, and its mobiles, Nuodo had emerged from her room and was rocking both babies in her long, spindly reddish arms while her two mouths emitted comforting _huffs_ of air. She was a mute. Padmé took Shmi, kissing the baby girl's hands and brow to quiet her. The girl whimpered against her chest.

"It's alright," Padmé whispered. She touched Qui-Gon's feathery hair with her free hand. "Mommy's here. Mommy loves you." She swayed, rocking Shmi back and forth while Nuodo cradled Qui-Gon. Anakin had insisted on the names. It left Padmé surrounded by memories, entombed with her husband's dead mother and the wise, quiet man who had saved her from Naboo. The man she still dreamed of sometimes, when Anakin was away.

Something was wrong. She could feel it in the air, or in herself, like a complex stench unfolding from a heap of garbage. _Anakin, _she thought, and for an instant she saw his screaming face, veins bulging at his temples, face bathed in the glow of his lightsaber. Then he was gone. She sat down on the chair beside Nuodo's, her daughter's small fingers clutching at her right breast. Was it Dooku? Had Anakin attacked him, or was it the other way around.

Padmé drew a deep, shuddering breath. She felt faint. Her heart pounded like a piston.

She saw blood and shadow.

MACE

They faced each other across the ruined office, sheets of flimsyplast drifting in the air like leaves, scorch marks and blood dragged across the floor, the walls, the panoramic window. The bodies of the others Mace had come with lay on the floor in various states of dismemberment. Mace himself leaned heavily against a bisected sculpture in his scorched and tattered robes, his lightsaber sparking fitfully in his hand. Palpatine had scored a shallow cut across its control surface, and Skywalker had grazed him several times. He'd lost blood.

The Chancellor was panting, points of color in his cheeks, but Anakin, spattered from head to toe in blood, seethed with ready menace.

"It's over, Jedi," Palpatine breathed. He savored each word like a delicacy. His irises were a lurid yellow, and his face seemed more ravaged than before, his skin infected with a greenish tinge, his teeth rotten and crooked. He grinned, his mouth like an open grave. "Surrender, and you will be treated equitably."

_ The real Chancellor at last, _thought Mace. He shoved himself away from the statue and deactivated his faltering lightsaber. "I am a Knight of the Jedi Order." There was heat in his voice, a smoldering anger he couldn't shut out, couldn't bury with restraint. "I am a shield to the Galactic Republic." He shrugged out of his robe, falling deeper into the Force, past pain, past tranquility into the raw, animal pulse of the Living Force, the roar of vital energy he had known in the jungles of Haruun Kal. "I learned at Yoda's knee." He clenched his fists. His knuckles cracked audibly.

He had failed his master, he had failed his friends, his allies, the vast ocean of citizenry he had been trained and raised to protect. Here, though, he had a chance to redeem himself. As he sank deeper into the Force he saw the shatterpoint he occupied, the crux on which the whole galaxy turned. Here, now, in the Chancellor's office were three men who would shape centuries to come. Cracks crazed the looking-glass of fate, shifting and creaking with ominous import.

_One chance._

Mace Windu spat on the floor. "Come and get me, you Sith trash."


	6. Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX: Unlimited Power

PALPATINE

Windu did not move quickly. Instead, he moved perfectly. Anakin rushed him, full of confusion, hurt, and anger at himself, at Palpatine, at the Order. The bald, dark-skinned Jedi tripped the younger man in passing, spun, and slammed a fist into the back of his skull. Anakin dropped like a sack of wet duracrete and in an instant Windu had his lightsaber. Palpatine blocked the first cut, dodged the second, and jerked back from the third with an inch to spare. The bridge of his nose blistered as azure death swept over his face.

Then, from perfection: chaos.

Windu roared. His elegant, sweeping motions became violence incarnate. His stolen lightsaber carved the air, crackling, and Palpatine scrambled back from the vicious onslaught, out into the antechamber. Windu slashed the door from its hinges. Palpatine blocked an overhead cut that would have opened him from sternum to groin, snarling with exertion as Windu bore down on him, his face a mask of purposeful rage. _He's strong. _Another blow nearly drove the Chancellor to his knees.

He had never truly considered the possibility that he would die in combat. Even now, as he fought a desperate retreat back into his office, blue wildfire raging all around him, it seemed a remote possibility. Death by the sword was the warrior's provenance, and while he'd made sure he knew enough to wade into red slaughter when called for, Darth Sidious was no warrior. He was a scholar, a statesman, a dragon coiled in manskin whispering poisoned truths to any who would listen. The idea of his life's meteoric trajectory ending with his body spitted by a lightsaber was laughable.

Windu beat him back. Silent and tempestuous, the taller man hacked at Sidious's elegant defenses until he was sweating and bone-tired. The blade drew closer, scorching brocade, burning hair. Sidious cried out in frustrated anger. With a gesture he raised debris up from the floor in a battering storm. Chunks of bronzium, stone, and boma wood whirled around the two men as they dueled. Windu's focus kept the worst of the whirlwind clear, but spinning shards of shrapnel left bloody slashes across his face, his arms, his chest. Windu moved through the storm like a swimmer through clear water. The wreckage of the desk flew at him and he hacked through it, detonating its remainder with a blast of Force energy. A hundred-pound slab of treated wood smashed through the window and high-altitude winds whipped through the office.

Palpatine raged, shrieking with every thrust and cut.

The galaxy had ripped itself apart at his command. Jedi had died. Kings, emperors, margravines, slavers, revolutionaries, and politicians. Whole worlds had burned beneath his uncaring gaze, sacrifices to the greater good that was the reborn Sith Imperium. Peace, prosperity, a hand on the tiller whose owner knew not just the currents of the senate but of the future and the past. Divine reign.

Gods did not die in duels.

Windu's foot connected with the base of his jaw. He staggered back, spitting up blood, and tripped over one of his upended sculptures. The room spun crazily as he slammed to the floor at the window's edge, glass lacerating his palms. He twisted, whipping his lightsaber around to block Windu's overhand slash, but the Jedi disarmed him with artless ease and Palpatine watched in numb horror as his lightsaber flew out into the tearing dark of Coruscant's night. _Surely, _he thought, _surely someone will see. Surely the guards are on their way._

He'd expected more from Anakin. The boy _was _the Force, embodied it in a way even he, Sidious, whose malevolent influence had blinded the galaxy's Jedi for decades, did not. He was a black hole, sucking at the Force like a hungry beast, worrying at its edges, fraying its weave with jagged teeth, but Anakin was a font of raw might, a titan among callow boys. Now he lay sprawled on the floor amidst the blood and broken glass, as glorious as shit on a boot-heel. _After all I gave him. _Fury flexed its cankered limbs, fingers squeezing Sidious's heart. _ All I did for that ungrateful child._

Mace raised Anakin's lightsaber. "Surrender." His voice smoked. It cracked the air like the tolling of some great, broken bell.

Sidious laughed through his mask of blood. "So I can stand trial in some puppet court?" He pushed himself up onto his elbows. "_I _made this Republic what it is. _I _undid what generations of Jedi meddling had done to the galaxy. _I _brought them all together, the billion races, united in war, erasing their divisions in blood and fire.

"Without me this galaxy will crumble into dust."

"You're only a man," said Windu, and there was no more anger in him. The laugh lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes were dark in the shifting shadows of the windblown office. The lightsaber's point dropped half an inch, and Palpatine saw his chance.

Hate was his fuel, and it burned like tainted iridium as he flung his hands up and let the Dark Side rage out of him. His nerves lit up with white-hot brilliance, and the entire office jittered and shook with shadows between blue-white flashes of lightning as agonizing bolts arced and crackled from Palpatine's fingers to Windu. The Jedi cried out in pain, his soul and skin scathed by rotten loathing, but he kept a tight hold on Anakin's lightsaber, and with a twist he interposed it between Palpatine's onslaught and himself.

And then the real agony began.

ANAKIN

He woke to pain. The world sparked and flared around him as he stood, and the vessel he had built for himself was cracking from the inside out. The fire and darkness he had poured into that crucible now suffused his body. Whispers sounded in his ears, exhorting him to wild action, to pointless destruction. The Chancellor's office was a thunderstorm. Windu's robes blazed as he stood webbed in lightning, his voice raised in furious protest, Anakin's lightsaber clutched in his smoking hands. Palpatine, hands outstretched, jerked and twitched in the Jedi's writhing shadow. They were joined by cables of raw hate, and Palpatine was burning from the inside out. His eyes were a cancerous yellow, his skin pasty green and ravaged, his gritted teeth rotten and crooked.

_Anakin, _said a calm, deep voice from a place hidden deep within the young Jedi. _No._

Anakin stood. Neither man saw him stand, and neither man heard him. He called Plo Koon's lightsaber to his hand. His ears rang; blood pounded through him as though driven by a bilge pump. Palpatine collapsed as he watched, falling back against the sill, one arm dangling out into the tearing wind. Smoke rose in wisps from his ruined flesh, his broken nails. Mace, trembling and choking, spotted Anakin from the corner of his eye. "It's not too late," the Jedi Master said. "Anakin, come back with me and we can make this right."

"Please." Palpatine voice was thin and reedy, barely audible over the roaring wind. "Don't let him kill me, Anakin."

"Don't listen to him," said Mace. "The Sith will say anything for power. I've been investigating him for months, delving into his past. The things he's done, Anakin... the bodies he's left in his wake. A plague on Dantooine. Children murdered on Naboo, his family house burned down, the records of his birth destroyed.

"He's not what you think he is."

The old, done man lay limp and broken, inches from the black abyss. "Help me, Anakin."

Mace raised his lightsaber- Anakin's lightsaber -and in that instant he towered like an avenging angel, his robes still smoldering, his dark skin glistening with sweat, his white teeth bared. Blue light washed the Chancellor's face, the bloodied glass on the floor, the papers whirling through the air.

Palpatine closed his eyes.

Anakin moved without thinking, pirouetting neatly on one foot as Plo Koon's lightsaber blazed to radiant life in his hand. The blade cut through Mace's wrist like hot steel through butter. The look of dumb shock on the older Jedi's face sent daggers into Anakin's heart. He recoiled, revulsion at his own act bringing the taste of bile into his mouth. His extinguished lightsaber, still clutched in Mace's hand, hit the floor at his feet. _What have I done?_

The Chancellor's reptilian eyes snapped open. He raised his hands and suddenly Mace's skeleton flared a brilliant white, visible through skin turned translucent by snarling lightning. Anakin couldn't breathe. The air stank of ozone and cooked flesh. Blisters erupted on Mace's face, his hand. His clothes burst into flame.

"POWER!" cried Palpatine, and in that moment Anakin saw the beast behind the mask, the gloating cruelty in the filmy eyes, the rotten snarl, the sagging skin. "UNLIMITED POWER!"

A surge of power blasted through the room and knocked Mace out into the empty night along with an explosion of papers, splinters, rags, and bloody remains. He plummeted into the dark like a burning brand tossed down a well, his robes whipping around him.

The Chancellor stood, his fingertips still sparking, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Ahhh," he said, the sound grotesque, obscenely satisfied. His eyes found Anakin's and for an instant the old warmth inhabited them, but then it was gone and only the flat, unreadable reptile remained. A hoary old dragon skinned up in manflesh. "We have work to do, Anakin.

"The Temple will know soon that Windu failed."

Anakin was drowning, blood slopping around his neck, pouring into his mouth. He had struggled for long enough, had compromised, sacrificed, sneaked, and cheated. Now his hands were stained so deep and dark that there was nowhere to run, no possibility of concealing his crime. There was nothing to do but dive and pray. "What..." his voice broke. "What do you want of me?"

Palpatine smiled. "Go to the Temple. Take your men, and settle accounts."

A cold, steely unconcern settled over Anakin like a mantle. He took his lightsaber from Mace's twitching hand and returned it to his belt. "The children?" _Not mine._

The mauled lips twisted into a grimace. "It is unfortunate, but they are already poisoned with Jedi dogma. We can't take the risk."

"I understand," Anakin said. He inclined his head. "Master." He swept out of the office, signaling the 501st on his comlink as he walked.

No going back now.

MACE

He had been so sure, after Organa had agreed to act as interim Chancellor, that moving against Palpatine was the right course. That certainty had been a clear, hard thing like glass or crystal. Now he fell, burning, and the cold light of the Chancellor's window receded ever further into the heavens. Had his misstep been trusting Skywalker? Volatility and recklessness had defined the boy since his entrance into the Order, but had this been waiting in him all along? This betrayal?

Mace felt himself ebbing from his body. The wind tore at his burning robes, but it soothed his blistered skin. He felt a strong, soft hand on his brow and heard his mother's voice on the wind. _What would I have been, if they hadn't taken me from you?_

He remembered her voice, and the touch of her lips on his young hands, and her dark, laughing eyes. He remembered her arms around him when the Order's emissaries had come, and the whisper of her words in his ear as she released him to those tall, robed figures.

_Love everyone, _she said. _Let them love you. Don't forget you're strong, and there are people who never will be. _

_ You have to be strong for them. _

_ For me._

He hadn't always kept his vows. He had loved, he had raged, he had given loss and fear rooms in his heart, and he had let his feelings rule him, sometimes. He blinked tears from his eyes before the wind could steal them. Below, lights bloomed in the darkness. He whipped past an airtaxi, the wash of its repulsors pushing him down into the wild abyss of Coruscant.

Had he lived as a Jedi should?

"You lived well," said a voice, and a lined, callused hand took Mace's remaining one.

He exhaled.

Mace Windu hit the duracrete patio of a stylish restaurant in the Betario District near the rotunda's foundations. The patrons wailed and screamed, knocking over their chairs in their haste to scramble away from the ruined corpse that lay wreathed in blood at the center of their golden paradise, dead eyes staring up into the fathomless dark.


	7. Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN: I Sense Much Fear In Him

ANAKIN

He climbed the steps of the Jedi Temple with the clones of the 501st marching behind him. Before, the galaxy's clamor had been unbearable, but now he had harnessed it. No more did he keep a furnace in his chest, waiting in terror for the day its walls must melt; now he moved with the maelstrom, and the hands on the reins were his own. Jedi waited at the door. Coleman Trebor, Oppo Rancisis, a handful of others he didn't recognize.

"What is the meaning of this, Jedi Skywalker?"  
>"Kill them," said Anakin, not slowing.<p>

The clones to his either side opened fire, bathing the steps in a withering hail of light. Rancisis alone managed to draw his lightsaber, but he deflected only a handful of blaster bolts before hot plasma ripped his serpentine body apart and left him oozing black blood onto the steps, still scarred by Grievous's assault. Anakin walked through the carnage without a thought. He watched as one of his clones put his blaster to the still-twitching Trebor's head and pulled the trigger, blasting the alien master's skull to red-hot pieces.

His boots tracked blood into the grand antechamber. The Jedi were coming, some dressed for bed, others awakened by the horrors Anakin had perpetrated at the Senate Round. Their lightsabers glowed in the marmoreal gloom, but they were ancient weapons, outdated and small. Blaster bolts scarred the walls and floors, blasting chunks of superheated marble through the air. Anakin split his legion again and again, the _tramp-tramp-tramp _of their armored boots ringing in his ears as he stepped over the steaming bodies of the fallen. The wildness in him exulted. He fed on death, and the storm he walked with grew stronger. His power cracked the marble walls.

What was there to lose? The Order foundered. He watched its last self-important scions choking on their blood in the echoing halls. He cut down the valiant few who threw themselves at him. With the Temple in ruins he could keep his family, work with the Chancellor to bring the war to an end, ensure that his children would never suffer under the yoke of slavery. _I can do real good, _he thought as he led a platoon of clones through the vaults of the Great Jedi Library. Jocasta Nu came at him from some hidden place within the stacks. Her lightsaber blazed to life in the instant before she struck, and a clone lost an arm before Anakin rammed her through a viewing screen with the Force. She lay on the floor, glass puncturing her body in a hundred places, blood seeping out of her.

"Coward," the old woman breathed. "Monster."

Anakin left her to die. He led his men through the labyrinth of old, dark stone, through the rooms where once the Masters of the Temple had taught him to limit himself, to silence his emotions, to shut out the roar of the Living Force as though it were a voice that could be silenced. _None of them knew, _Anakin told himself, consoling his bruised pride as he watched a pair of older Mon Cal Padawans fall to sniper fire from the galleries above the Grand Atrium. _None of them understood._

Even Obi-Wan had failed to grasp the gulf between his own experience with the Force and Anakin's daily struggle, the hell of sensation Qui-Gon's training had subjected him to. Anakin gripped the railing, watching as one of the Padawans dragged herself shakily onward. A blaster bolt caught her spine and she dropped, but he could feel the life in her, the vital rage. He reached out and crushed her lungs, her liver, her heart.

Dozens escaped him. Yoda. Aayla Secura. Evan Piell. Obi-Wan, who he'd both longed and feared to find. Could he kill the man who had been father and brother to him? His real hand itched to close around that smug ascetic's throat, to crush the life from the man who had belittled him at every turn, who had tried to drive him away from Palpatine when the Chancellor had only wanted to help... _Except that wasn't it, was it? _said a small, nagging voice in the back of Anakin's head. He told it to be silent as, alone and shaking, he climbed the steps to the Council Chamber. _He was a Sith. He wanted __your allegiance, not to help you._

_ He never loved you. He doesn't love you now._

_ The diary could be lies. _

_ He's using you._

The doors accepted his palm print. It sent a guilty thrill up his spine, tickled the Tatooine desert-rat inside him that his hand secured access to one of the seats of galactic power. The doors slid open on the Temple's children, the offspring of a hundred races crowded into the city-lit gloom of the chamber with only the empty seats of the Councilors to guard them. A stocky Gamorrean female looked up at him with sad, wide eyes from beside his own black bench. She couldn't have been older than six. "Master Skywalker," she said. "We locked the doors like Master Yoda said, but there are too many of them! What should we do?"

They looked at him, imploring, desperate to place their faith in an adult, to let the nightmare end and restore their quiet world to its proper order. Anakin felt the tears hot on his cheeks. The little Gamorrean stumbled back, comprehension dawning on her face as he drew his lightsaber and ignited the blade. Fear bloomed in the chamber, hothouse-rich and sharp.

_Snap-hiss._

When it was done he sank down into Obi-Wan's seat and shoved the still-warm hilt of his lightsaber into his mouth. The stench of charred flesh filled his nostrils. He wept. He screamed. He raged until the windows broke, until the council seats tore loose from the floor and the ceiling cracked wide open. He pressed the emitter surface against the roof of his mouth, wrapped both hands around the hilt, and rocked back and forth while the little bodies cooled around him, while outside lights whipped past in the coming dawn and the clones of the 501st executed Temple staff in the courtyard below. He slumped back against the worn arm of Obi-Wan's seat and sobbed until he could hardly breathe and the room spun drunkenly around him, and then he pulled the lightsaber from his mouth and laughed like a madman until his throat was raw.

On Boz Pity he had saved a million lives. On Mon Calamari he had rescued the Prime Minister and her children from a plot to bomb her box at the yearly sea races. At the war's start he had saved Naboo from the Separatist blockade. This, though, would be the moment the galaxy remembered. Anakin Skywalker, hero of the Republic, standing knee-deep in butchered children at the heart of the Order he'd gutted with his own two hands.

This would be his legacy.

"Lord Skywalker," came the harsh, vox-filtered voice of one of the clone commanders. The armored figure stood in the doorway, pitiless black visor looking out uncaring over the killing floor. "Your transport awaits, sir."

Anakin looked up at the man, the thing, the pasty copy with Fett's face hidden by the skull-like mask. Two others waited at the commander's back. _Like stacking blocks._ Anakin reached out with the Force, with shadow-arms gnarled and warped by fulminating rage, and seized the commander by the neck. He jerked the clone up into the air and _squeezed, _grinding his teeth together like millstones while the white boots swung and danced above the marble floor. When bones broke he let the clone drop and stood, his ragged cloak trailing in the blood on the floor. "You," he pointed at the nearer of the two survivors, "you're promoted.

"Clean this mess up. The Jedi killed the children before we arrived."

"Yes, Lord Skywalker." The clone saluted.

He strode out of the Council Chamber. "When you're done," he rasped back over his shoulder, "burn the whole thing to the ground."

His footsteps echoed in the gathering dark while the clones piled dead children atop one another like cordwood, or chunks of peat. Things that would burn, soon.

PALPATINE

His guards had come for him, both Jango's square-jawed dopples and the silent red-robed elite he had bred for himself. No need for tongues when their only purpose was to guard his person, as the Mandalore's guards had before the raiders' defeat and collapse. Palpatine had tolerated their concern only long enough to trip the switch he'd paid so exorbitantly to have installed in his custom-built army: Order 66. Every clone, in every remote posting across the Galaxy, would turn against their Jedi generals without rancor, without feeling, without the slightest touch of anything out of the ordinary, anything a Jedi might sense.

It would be over in minutes. On all the war-torn worlds of the Republic and the CIS the clones would check their comlinks, note the message on the encrypted Imperial Channel, and gun down the beings who had led them through hell and high water without a second thought. _Revenge, _thought Palpatine as the spidery medical droid set his nose, broken by Windu's kick. _How many thousands of us did they slaughter? Let them reap what they've sown._ He was alone, but for the droid, in his secret office beneath the rotunda. The whir and hiss of the great round's repulsorlift platforms settling back into their spiral galactic configuration sounded through the curved glass walls behind which a dwarf Colo Claw-fish swam in restless circles, its prison four hundred thousand gallons of brine.

"We're finished, Chancellor," the medical droid chimed. It folded its many limbs up into its black carapace and stepped back respectfully.

Palpatine fingered the light gossam-silk bandage set across the bridge of his nose. His face still felt sore, and to have his true appearance exposed at last had been thrillingly nerve-wracking for hours after his duel with Windu, but now of course the ravages of the Dark Side were his battle scars. He had escaped the tyrannical Jedi usurpers and Anakin Skywalker, heroic patriot, had slain them all in righteous fury. Already Amedda was preparing a slate of commercials and public speakers denouncing the Jedi, laying out their plot to seize control over the Republic, perhaps suggesting their complicity with the CIS. It really didn't matter anymore.

Windu, though, had pulled the ripcord early. Palpatine had expected another month in which to plan before he accepted Dooku's gracious surrender on the Senate steps. Next in his plan came the Count's decapitation, providing he hadn't managed to have Dooku pushed off a ledge or shot before then, but that detail could wait. "Oh, no!" Palpatine cried, miming distress with his hands. "The treacherous Count has betrayed his oath! He tried to stab the Chancellor in his sleep just hours after signing the articles of surrender!

"How fortunate that Skywalker was there to behead him and burn the corpse!"

He cackled to himself, spinning in his seat like a child. The hollow vastness of the round above him seemed like an egg waiting to crack open, the vast seed of a cosmic empire that would stretch from the glittering skylanes of Coruscant to the barren plains of Tatooine. There were Jedi to hunt down, true, but no more than a few score. Lost and broken beings, bereft of the trappings of their power, hated and feared by the Separatists they'd fought so valiantly against and by the Republic they'd betrayed. Of all the scattered Jedi, only Yoda and Kenobi were real threats, Yoda for his cunning and knowledge, Kenobi for his connection to Skywalker. The boy might still crack beneath the pressure, if Kenobi applied the right leverage to his fragile psyche.

Force him to slaughter his mentor, though, and his journey would be complete. Palpatine had foreseen their meeting years before, the crash of their contest a duel between a pair of giants, one bright and terrible and sad, the other a raging inferno bound up in fraying skin. Worlds would tremble, but in the end Skywalker would prevail and Kenobi would fall to nothing at his feet. It was clear as glass in Palpatine's memory, the sweetness of that vision.

The door chimed and Mas Amedda stepped into the office, his horns wavering in the green light. "The Senators are en route, Chancellor," he said. "They'll be here within the hour."

"Good," said Palpatine. He stood, hands on his desk, looking down at his ruined reflection. "Leave me. I require time to concentrate."

The chagrian bowed, horns dipping, and then swept from the room, his long robes trailing behind him. Palpatine had chosen somber black for the occasion, a simple robe without embellishment or decoration. Amedda was too given to his little indulgences. Thousand-credit suits, expensive Corellian wines, prostitutes drawn from any of a dozen different species at no small expense. Palpatine had been careful to hide his aide's little transgressions from the public eye; Amedda was good at twisting arms, putting the stick about. That was about to end, though.

Palpatine shelved the problems of the day and sank down into the emptiness that was the Force. It had always been easy for him, like drawing aside a curtain, and at the center of the great abyss that was Coruscant, a world swamped in grief, in hate, in riotous violence, it was easier still. Like a stone he dropped through the void of his power, the cancerous emptiness that he and he alone could work and wield. In the void he saw the signs and symbols of his victory.

On a nameless moon clones executed a kneeling line of drugged Jedi Padawans. In the thinning skies above Ramphoros, two Republic fighters dropped down behind a third and loosed their cluster rockets. The Jedi fighter broke up in a cloud of flames, its pilot snuffed. An ailing Talz Master sleeping in a Rodian slum woke as a clone soldier drove a vibro-knife through her breast. A Twi'Lek bounding through the jungles of Felucia in pursuit of a CIS transport took a sniper's plasma bolt to the small of the back and collapsed amidst the rotting fungal matter, her skin burnt and smoking. Boots tramped through the muck. More shots.

The galaxy echoed with the death rattle of the pompous and the vain, the weak and the corrupt. Whole worlds had been cleansed of their insurrectionist impurity. Whole sectors had burned to make way for the triumph of the galaxy resurgent, a Sith Master returned to the helm of history. As in the echoing round above him the Senators arrived to hear his trembling speech, his heartfelt admission that he had been deceived by the galaxy's protectors, Palpatine smiled.

PADME

He stumbled through the doors near dawn, spattered with blood and reeking of smoke. Padmé ran to him, let him wrap her in his arms. For a while he sobbed against her shoulder like a wounded animal, insensate with grief. She felt as though she were standing in the heart of a storm. Her mother's handmade claywork rattled on the display shelf by the door. In the kitchen a glass fell from the counter and smashed on the cold tiles.

"Anakin." Her heart was a hard, cold stone inside her breast. She'd sat awake since her dream, drinking linum-wine and smoking in the unlit kitchen. "What happened?" Her own secrets writhed in her belly like serpents. She could not tell him.

He closed. The tempest vanished, and the glassy coldness in his eyes was worse. He kissed her cheek, lips dry and chapped, and pulled away to pour himself a drink. "The Jedi rebelled," he said, his voice flat. A long, shallow burn ran the length of his right arm, his real arm, from elbow to thumb. "I saw Master Windu try to assassinate the Chancellor." His mouth twitched. "I stopped him."

"No." The denial was absolute. A hollowness came into her, a sense of weightless plummeting. "That can't be true."

"I watched it happen," Anakin said. He drank, liquid running in dark droplets down his throat. His hand shook as he set the glass down on the counter. "He brought half the Council with him to the Chancellor's office. I...I had no choice. I had to save him, Padmé. All he's done for me," his mouth firmed into a bitter line. "For us." He poured himself another glass of the strong Corellian brandy.

The children began to cry. Padmé felt cold. "Of course," she said. He took her hand in his false one, and that was when she saw them: children stumbling back in terror, the stink of charred meat, small eyes wide with fear in the flashing shadow of a wide, dark room. She forced herself to say nothing, forced herself to take him in her arms. He smelled like blood and sweat. _This is impossible. _"Nuodo," she called, her voice cracking. "Please-"

"No," said Anakin, pushing her away. "I'll do it."

He must have sensed her fear. His expression grew hard and he pushed past her into the living area. He went into the nursery. Padmé stayed behind. She cinched her synth-silk nightgown closed and tried to suppress the scream boiling up within her. There were knives on the magnetic racks over the sink. She could take one. She could kill him while he slept, wrapped up in nightmares. He reemerged from the nursery with the twins wailing in his arms. "They're not safe," he said, coming toward her. His eyes were bloodshot, his stubbled scalp sweaty and burnt.

"What?" It was too much. She could hear the high, thin note of panic in her voice. "Anakin, we're under guard here. What are you talking about?"

He shoved past her again, the front door sliding open at his approach. "None of us is safe," he said. His voice rasped like he'd been breathing smoke. She hurried after him, her daughter's small red face peering at her over her husband's shoulder. The girl was howling miserably, mucous glistening on her upper lip. Anakin quickened his pace and Padmé had to jog to keep up with him. He was heading for the top-floor flight deck.

"Please, just talk to me," Padmé cried. "We can send them to Naboo once everything quiets down, to my parents and my sister! Anakin,_ please!"_

She grabbed hold of his sleeve and he jerked his arm roughly from her grip. He halted, turning, and his stare was colder than vacuum. "You should go with them," he said. "I don't trust this district. I don't trust this planet." His mouth hardened. "You'll go."

"I won't," she said. She could hardly meet his eyes. "I'm not going, Anakin. Please, don't send them away. Not now, not before we know what's happened-" _Not until I know why you did what you did. Not until I can get them away, get them from you. _

He started walking again. She followed, tears stinging the corners of her eyes, and then they were emerging onto the rooftop deck and a shuttle was dipping down toward them, its atmospheric wings folded for descent, its floodlights sweeping the low dormers and skylights of the apartment building's summit. A boarding ramp slid down from the shuttle's port side to the duracrete deck. Anakin strode toward it and Padmé just stared after him, clutching her robe shut with both hands as the downdraft of the shuttle's engines pressed it flat against her body. Two armored clones with the clenched fist emblem of the 501st legion on their breastplates came tramping down the ramp. They fanned out, covering the roof with the barrels of their blaster rifles.

"Anakin," she was being torn apart, hand yanking at her guts. "Anakin, where are you sending them? Why are you doing this? Anakin...please."

More soldiers came down the ramp and Padmé could taste the uncomprehending fear in her children as their father handed them over. She wanted to rip the helmets off the clones, to scratch their eyes out and drop the remains off the building. She clutched at herself, nails digging into her own skin. The clones took her children up into the belly of the shuttle. The others followed them. Anakin, his dark cloak whipped around him, turned back to her as the ship lifted into the air with a thrum of repulsors firing.

"They'll be safe," he said, and when he smiled she saw the Council Chamber and the flames and the blade and the little bodies cut and ruined, raining down around him to the hard stone floor.

OBI-WAN

Obi-Wan sat huddled behind a mountain of trash in an alley that stank of smoke and blood. His hood was raised, shadowing his features for all the good it would do. Filthy water dripped down on his robe from high above. His beard was untrimmed, his hair greasy, his left hand blistered by a close graze from a clone trooper's blaster. They had turned on him like sharks after he'd led them back from an assault on a Confederate-held warehouse. Before that, though, he had felt voices cry out. He had felt his brothers and sisters, his comrades, die. Snuffed out.

He'd barely escaped the warehouse with his life. For two weeks he'd lost himself in the war-torn depths of Coruscant. He'd crawled down into the blackest levels of the city-planet's underworld where pale cast-offs foraged in the fungal dark. He'd dodged kill squads in the pounding factory districts south of the Senate Rotunda. It all felt like a dream. Now, in this alley, he stared down at his bandaged hands. His robes were rotting in the moist, caustic air. His tunic stank of mildew. He had received a letter in the flophouse where, after convincing the drunken Aqualish proprietor that he was a solicitor for Rothana Arms, he had taken a room three nights previous.

The letter had said only one thing: _come, _and then an address for a burned-out boutique in a dreary part of the fashion district. A ventilation shaft yawned hugely a half-block away, its updraft warm and fetid as bad breath. The Force hummed and jittered with disruptions. Obi-Wan had seen holo-feeds of the fighting, the Republic's push against a suddenly wrong-footed Confederacy. He saw it for what it was. Palpatine had been playing both ends against the middle. He had blinded them all while he set his pieces into place.

Anakin was in the middle of it, somehow. Obi-Wan had felt his searing anguish from the temple district on the night of the disaster, but the younger man had survived. He was alive and free; that much Obi-Wan could be certain of. _What did you do, Anakin? _He passed a hand over his unshaven face. _What did you do to us?_

"Master Kenobi."

The familiar gravelly tone drew Obi-Wan out from his reverie. Yoda stood a short distance away, rain falling around him as he leaned on his cane. He looked little better than Obi-Wan felt, but just the sight of him, the quiet depth of his presence, drew some of the despair out of the dank, dark alleyway. Obi-Wan stood and bowed to his Master. He felt a weight drop from his shoulders. "Master Yoda," he said, trying to keep the tears from his voice. "The temple, the...the children-"

Yoda shook his head. "Talk we will not of these things," he said. "At peace they are. One with the Force." He smiled a sad, tired smile. "Luminous beings are we, Master Kenobi."  
>Obi-Wan believed. He <em>wanted <em>to believe. All he felt was a ringing emptiness in the pit of his stomach. "Are there others?"

"Some," Yoda allowed. "Short our time grows, though, and powerful have the Sith become." He walked past Obi-Wan, his cane tapping against the moldering duracrete. "Come quickly, Master Kenobi. Much work lies before us."

Obi-Wan followed, head bowed against the rain, his cloak wrapped close around him.


	8. Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT: To Blood

DOOKU

She met him at the One-Eared Vrelt. He'd half-suspected that she wouldn't come, but there she was at the entrance in an elegant wrap of grey synth-silk, a hood raised to hide her face. She needn't have bothered. No one on Coruscant, especially none of the beings now clamoring and dancing and fornicating on the ground floor of the One-Eared Vrelt, cared about politics anymore. Eyes followed her. Gossam, Aqualish, humans, a score of races; the Senator was beautiful. Even surrounding by pulsing lights and the garish pornography of the wall-mounted vid displays, she stood out.

She came to stand beside Dooku at the scarred, stained bar. She ordered a glass of firewine from the morose Duros bartender. Dooku could feel the anguish in her, the hole that Skywalker's betrayal had punched through her heart. _And all it took was a few low-rent assassins sent into the building. _Dooku had hired idiots, then called an anonymous tip in to the clones guarding the apartment complex. Skywalker had seen the bodies, though, and the guards had reported the attempt. _Fathers are all alike. We just want our children kept safe. _

_ Mothers want them kept _close.

"Senator."

She sipped her firewine, points of color kindling in her cheeks. Under her hood her hair was disheveled, her usual cosmetics absent. "You did it." The declaration was both absolute and desperately fragile. She had spent hours convincing herself. "You did this to us."

"Yes," he said, setting down his own glass of cheap Fondorian nettle-liquor. "I forced your husband to kill his comrades, swear allegiance to the Dark Lord of the Sith, and murder a room full of wailing children. It was during one of our non-existent meetings that I first planted the seeds that have driven Anakin Skywalker to madness."

She blanched as though he'd slapped her in the face. "Do you think I'm an idiot?" She thrust her face close to his, teeth bared and eyes wild. A lock of her dark hair hung out of place. "He would never have killed his fellow Jedi. This is all a part of your sick game."

The bar's patrons paid them no mind. Dooku had long ago found that dives like this one were the best places in the galaxy to conduct business discretely. The face he had built for himself, the master statesman and the orator, was not one that would crop up in the One-Eared Vrelt. He wore a plain suit and hadn't bothered with a shave. His lightsaber was hidden in his sleeve. Now that he and Poggle had commenced their race against the clock there was no room for error or detection; Palpatine's spies could not be allowed to apprehend his movements.

He tossed back his drink, then met Padmé Naberrie's frantic gaze. "I have never spoken to your husband," he said. "Palpatine corrupted him. Last night he slew the children of the Jedi Temple in the Council Chamber. I felt the disturbance in the Force myself, as, I'm sure, did you. It's why he sent your own children away.

"It must be torture, not knowing where they are."

He had her. Pain put faint lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. "You have them."

"My agents took them in orbit." It had been close work. In truth he had led the boarding party himself, and the clones guarding the shuttle had put up a savage fight. "They're waiting near Serenno, safe in the Sith Academy."

She wanted to kill him. That same hot-tempered instinct she'd displayed the night that he, unbeknownst to her, had begun her training. "Sith Academy?" She spoke through her teeth.

"We have been too few for too long." He paid for their drinks and slipped his arm through hers. The gyrating crowd parted for them as he led her toward the door and the pouring night. "It is time for a new ruling class. An ascendant humanity. Will you walk with me?"

Her lips whitened. Tears welled up in her eyes. She nodded.

The maimed cityscape, half-hidden by the sheeting rain, greeted them outside the club. This far down Coruscant was a ko-spider's web of durasteel walkways and yawning chasms. Lights glittered like greasfires in the distance. Most of the entertainment district was dark but high, high above Dooku could see the flickering exchanges of a major sortie between Confederate and Republic armadas. It looked like stars trading fire, bright lights lashing out at one another. Padmé kept close to him as they moved through the sparse walkway crowd toward a sleek black speeder.

Dooku felt a prickle at the back of his neck. He opened the speeder's doors with a wave of his hand and helped the Senator into the passenger's seat. "I suggest you buckle in," he said. "I suspect this is about to become substantially more interesting." He felt the blaster bolt coming like a climax, a series of hot murmurs in his skin. His lightsaber slipped from his sleeve, the curved hilt in his palm like something that had never left. Ruby light blazed and the incoming bolt flew back up and into the dark. He swung himself up into the driver's seat and embraced the Force just as a pair of _LAAT-_series gunships dropped down through the rain, floodlights washing over the walkway, blister-mounted cannons already firing. A dead clone hung from his crash webbing in one of the guns, his helmet neatly holed at the temple. Dooku laughed. Padmé, to her credit, uttered only a single terrified sound as he undocked the speeder and threw it into a dead plunge.

Duracrete and support girders flew past at dizzying speeds as Dooku, fiery power clawing through his bloodstream, primed the speeder's engines. They dropped like a stone into the planet's depths. Walkways and bridges whipped past them. The engines roared to life, repulsors filling the luxuriant cabin with static, and then they were off. Dooku laughed, juking to avoid a battered old freighter lifting off from a mobile dock. The LAATs were still on his tail, though far behind and high above. Their wings and heavy armaments made them difficult to maneuver in the cramped quarters of the planet's underlevels; whoever had sent them, Palpatine or Skywalker, had been scrambling.

"What the hell are you doing?" Padmé screamed over the howling of the speeder's engines.

"You were followed," Dooku replied, hauling back on the control yoke to jump a low-lying neon sign advertising a Skakoan specialty whorehouse's wares. "I suspected it might be the case. Fortunately, my ship is only a few hundred kilometers from here."

"Your ship?" The voice weak, fearful. She still hadn't internalized her betrayal. "What?"

"Don't play stupid." Blaster fire raked the face of a warehouse as one of the LAATs dropped into the kill position behind them. Dooku killed the engine governors. The cockpit warmed by a few degrees as they leapt forward. "You agreed to leave with me as soon as you walked into that bar. You've already begun your journey toward true knowledge, Senator." He shot through a narrow gap between two catwalks, terrifying a crowd of Gran. "Now be silent."

They lost the gunships, outstripping them as Dooku slipped deeper and deeper into the Force. The world around him was fire and lightning, so bright that it clawed at his eyes and his soul. He tore through it like a freezing knife. He was so tired by the time he docked the speeder in the hold of the corvette _Darth Malak, _stationed over the Twin Suns apartment complex deep in CIS territory,that it was all he could do to stagger out of the still-whining vehicle and accept a moist towel from one of the valet droids. He noticed for the first time that his private comlink was chiming frantically. Palpatine. It brought a smile to his slack and weary face.

The crew had their instructions. They were bound for orbit before the Count and his guest gained the bridge. Coruscant dwindled behind them, a scarred jewel hanging in the void. The jump to hyperspace lifted years from Dooku's shoulders. He sat upright and pensive in his command chair, no longer in his plain traveling clothes but a fine black suit and half-cape, his lightsaber proudly restored to his belt. Padmé sat beside him in the first officer's seat. The droid bridge crew went about their duties silently and the lone Neimoidian steersman had little more to say.

"I'll kill you if they're hurt," the Senator said. Her voice was flat. Dead.

Dooku said nothing. He let himself fall through the Force for the long first hours of the journey through hyperspace, let himself become a drop of rain and meld seamlessly with the raging ocean of the galaxy. Behind him he could feel the vast malevolence of his master rousing itself in Coruscant's gravity well, a great beast stirred to fury after centuries of slumber. _I'm gambling everything, _Dooku thought. _This has become too personal. Qui-Gon, Asajj..._

He vaguely sensed Padmé's departure to the crew quarters in the lower decks. She was grieving for her husband. It was only natural. In time he retired to his own apartments. They took breakfast together most mornings. He was gentle with her in the absence of her children, keeping to the very basics of the Sith philosophy and history. She was a receptive student, if a distracted one. The days blurred into weeks. She ate little, slept badly. Dooku meditated in his chambers.

The _Darth Malak _exited hyperspace near Serenno's eastern continent's morning nearly a month after entering it near the black of night in Coruscant's Menari District. The blue-and-tan sphere of his homeworld stirred a melancholy pleasure in Dooku's breast. Its two moons, Abatt and Cheln, were rising. He rose from his seat. "Helm," he said, "set course for the Sith Academy."

"Yes, Lord Dooku," came the helmsman's nasal reply. The viewscreen shifted, blurring, and the frigate adjusted its course. A new moon joined the planet's two. It was smaller than its siblings, a jagged little sphere cradled in the black, its face marred by a vast grey crater, its lines suspiciously artificial even at so vast a distance.

Padmé joined Dooku a few minutes later. She was clean and immaculately made-up, her hair piled high in an elegant knot, her dress a regal blue brocade with a narrow waist and Trandoshan poetry knots worked into the sleeves and bust. Golden chimes adorned her hair, and they rang softly as she came to a halt a few paces from where Dooku stood. She glanced at him, eyes wide, and then back at the screen. "What...what is that thing?"

The false moon grew larger in the viewscreen. "The future," Dooku said.

JANGO

He was Jango. The man across the room from him was Jango. The guards at the door were Jango. His son, studying in his room, was Jango. It made perfect sense. He could just explain everything to (Jango) and then Boba would be safe, even if he died. The other Jangos wouldn't live as long as he could, but there were more of them. They'd take care of the boy.

"You seem very calm today, Master Fett," said Taun We as she examined his ears with a holo-scanner. The graceful Kaminoan was bent nearly double next to the examination chair where Jango sat. "How are your dreams?"

"I dream about Korda 6," he said, because that was what (Jango) dreamed about. "I remember Montross, my second, taking shrapnel in his leg. I remember thinking that I would never fight again after that day." Bloodied fronds of jur-palms swaying in the breeze. Screams of the Mandalorians pinned down by Death Watch commandos. "Fucking zealots."

"Language, Master Fett," Taun We chided gently. The operating room was typically Kaminoan, a plain white dome centered on the chair and the banks of readouts and instrument tables around it. Kamino, the world where he'd (been born and born and born and born and born and-) first seen the other Jangos. He knew the white looked vibrant to the Kaminoans. They were like mating avians to each other, all kind of riotous shades. To him they just looked white (like the armor he wore when he wasn't himself).

"My apologies, Madame Senator."

"You're to lead the insurgent team tasked with bringing back Senator Naberrie." Taun We sounded like a proud parent. "Isn't that an honor, Master Fett?"

"It is, Madame Senator."

"Well don't sound so gloomy, then." She snapped off the holo-scanner and stepped back, straightening to her full height of just under three meters. The smile she wore looked strange on her tiny mouth. Her eyes looked dusty, somehow, as though the light-scribed pupils were leaking motes of perception into the blackness surrounding them. "The Chancellor is depending on you, Jango."

"Yes," said Jango, looking down at (someone's) hands. How many Jangos had he been so far? "Thank you very much, Madame Senator." He hopped down from the chair and rolled his shoulders. "Excuse me. Been a long day." He tried for his rough charm, hoisted his mouth into a tight, roguish grin. She looked appeased as he turned and left the room.

The other Jangos nodded to him at the door. He took a lift back to his apartments, right under the Chancellor's. Bare rooms. Clean desk. Small kitchen, military rations in the cupboards. His armor shone on a special stand in the living area. Boba was running through his exercises in his room. The boy, no, the young man, had grown. He was getting lanky, no longer a child but without the weight and muscle adulthood would give him. Jango leaned against the doorframe and watched him for a while, and then he went into his own room and used his terminal to send a priority request to Mas Amedda's office. Didn't the Chancellor think that his presence at the battle to rescue the Senator would have more impact if he arrived in Slave I?

The Chagrian replied an hour later, his brief message the textual equivalent of a shrug. _Whatever you feel is best, General Fett. Surely, your sensibilities for war outstrip my own._

Jango resolved to kill Mas Amedda if he got the chance. He closed his terminal's screen and moved to the floor where he ran through a set of simple breathing and stretching exercises. His hands shook when he was done. There was sweat beaded on his brow. He was old. Older than (Jango).

"Dad?" It was Boba. He stood in the doorway.

"You want to go," said Jango. He used his darkest tone, the one that always presaged a lecture and a stiff penalty. "You want to go on the rescue mission. Into the teeth of Dooku's armada."

"They're driving the Confederates off of Coruscant," Boba said, careful not to beg. He knew Jango hated it when he whined. "I want to fight with you, dad. Like you did with Jaster."

Jango sat down on the edge of his cot. He patted the bed. Boba joined him, already looking disappointed. Jango folded his arms. "I'd already decided to bring you," he said. "You're a man now, Boba. It's time you understood what that means."

The boy blinked, incredulous and leery. "What?"

"You're coming with me." Jango rose and poured them each a tin cup of Mandalorian cut-glass brandy. Boba just stared at his.

"We follow the code of the Mandalorians. Battle is our sacrament. War is our god. It's time for your confirmation." Jango raised his cup.

Boba raised his.

"To blood," said Jango.

"To blood," said his son.

They drank.

OBI-WAN

Bail Organa had sheltered Yoda and a score of survivors in the aftermath of the Temple purge. Most of them were children, survivors of the holo-recorded massacre that Yoda played for Obi-Wan. After watching the recording Obi-Wan went to his guest suite's refresher and stood in the shower for more than an hour. He couldn't remember his last shower. Calm was his only defense, but he had no serenity left in him. Instead there was resignation.

He had failed. He had failed in every way it was possible to do so. He had taken up arms when he should have sought peace. He had neglected a young man in peril. He had ignored the warning signs of that man's fall. He had concealed some of them himself. Padmé. The children. He had been a sword for government rather than a shield for the people. Hot water scalded him as he stood under the shower, head tipped back, eyes closed.

Anakin's children, his secret wife, were gone now. Dooku had taken them. The Republic was gearing up for a final campaign against the retreating Separatists. Obi-Wan turned off the water and stepped out onto the plain black bath mat. He dried himself, trimmed his beard, shaved his neck. She sky outside the glazed and blast-shielded window looked tired and sullen. Bruise-colored clouds swirled over the cityscape. The Menari District was a glowing wasteland in the wake of the final exchange between the fleeing CIS and the Republic's Home Fleet.

Obi-Wan dressed himself brusquely in the plain clothes Bail Organa's staff had provided. Brown trousers, cream shirt, brown coat, sensible boots. He regarded the lightsaber sitting by the sink.

_Master, _Anakin had said once in the dueling atrium of the Temple, _why do we carry lightsabers? _He'd been a shade past twenty, a sunburned man with a quiet, fixated intensity.

_To remind us of our role, _Obi-Wan had answered him. They'd sat together on a stone bench by a reflecting pool. Fondorian carp swam in lazy circles beneath the umber surface. _We are protectors, Anakin, and our lives are forfeit in the cause of peace and justice._

"Butchery and stupidity," he said to himself in the vast, luxuriant emptiness of Bail Organa's washroom. He buckled the lightsaber on under his coat and walked out into the hall. A liveried member of the Senator's household staff bowed in passing. They were the most tight-lipped assembly of people Obi-Wan had ever met. Twenty-three Jedi in the spacious apartment and so far they had faced only a cursory security sweep. _Palpatine would trade a battle fleet for the contents of this house._

Just being on the same planet as the Chancellor made Obi-Wan feel unclean. He could tell the direction of the Rotunda by the unclean gravity of the man's presence, the fulminating cloud of his influence on the Force. He was like a vile crustacean stirring silt from the ocean floor. Obi-Wan walked down the wood-paneled halls past pictures of the Senator's handsome wife Queen Breha, his distinguished family, his laughing nieces, his university repulsor-polo team.

What would it have been like to have a family? Obi-Wan remembered so little of his home. Qui-Gon had been a father figure, but a distant one. What if his mother had wrapped him in her arms each night? What if his father had walked with him along the field-side paths of their farm? He knew they had grown crops on Stewjon, and that once he had run laughing with a brother along a mossy riverbank. They'd shared slices of sticky orange-red fruit in the fading daylight.

Had he been four? Five? The memories hung over him like a cloud as he passed out of the hall and into the tastefully-appointed sitting room. It took all the composure he could muster to stifle the cry of horror that welled up in him at the sight of Bail Organa seated opposite an unmasked officer of the Chancellor's Guard. The red-robed clone was not one of the Fett models but a tall, pale man with receding blonde hair and a long, dour face. He carried a projection holo-slate on which he was typing swiftly while the serving staff set down a tea service and finger sandwiches on the lacquered dessert table between himself and Organa.

"Ah, Owen," said Bail, his tone conversational, "come and have a glass of tea with us. It's a fungal brew from Feluccia. Proprietary, and very good for the liver." He sipped at his own cup. "Lieutenant Jarrod was just going over some of the new protocols with me, and I'm sure we could both benefit from your informed opinion." He turned back to the Guardsman. "Owen has a brother in the Order. He came to me to volunteer his help in finding the fugitive, Obi-Wan."

The Guardsman fixed Obi-Wan with a murderous stare. He typed and words flashed across his projection slate. _You are aware that relation to a member of the heretical and treasonous so-called Jedi Order makes you subject to Senatorial inquest and subpoena? _

The man was a mute. Obi-Wan took a seat beside Bail and rubbed his sweating palms on the knees of his trousers. Now that his reminiscences had departed he could hear the tramp of plastoid boots on fine hardwood. Clones were searching the Senator's apartments. _Please, _he thought desperately as he marshaled his thoughts. _Please, let Master Yoda and the children be safe. _"I am aware of my brother's crimes, Lieutenant," he said carefully. "We haven't seen each other in several decades, but I wish to do all I can to bring him to justice. The stain on my family's honor is a matter of great shame to the memory of my parents."

_You have not seen him. Have you heard from him? Sent him any communications? _The man's brows drew down. _Withholding information on this matter is a capital offense, master Kenobi._

"Owen will do fine, Lieutenant," Obi-Wan said. "I sent a transmission to my brother just last week at the Senator's express request, hoping to convince him to fall upon the mercy of the courts. He has not replied, and it is my belief that he has died or left Coruscant." _Thank the fates Bail had send those false-flag signals. If they've cracked Temple code, though, we'll have hanged ourselves. _"He was not a warlike man, sir. I doubt he could have survived long in a zone of combat."

_Your impressions are noted, _the clone typed, scowling. _If he presents himself at this or any other residence you will inform the Senatorial Guard and your local security dispatch station without delay._ He stood, robes rustling. _Thank you for the tea, Senator. Owen. _He stowed his slate inside his robes and lifted his Mandalorian-styled helm from the side table. It gave him the look of a blood-drenched ghost. He touched the comlink on his wrist, then left the sitting room with Organa hurrying after him to show him to the door.

Obi-Wan remained seated, breathing deeply until the last of the clones had left the building. He practically sprinted down to the basement levels, ignoring Bail's shouted questions. He vaulted down a spiral wrought-iron stair and jogged down the guest corridor to the rearmost servants' quarters where he found Yoda comforting a room full of shaken children and toddlers. The old Master held a squalling Neimoidian grub in his arms. The room resonated with the deep, warm quiet of his presence. He was like an island in storm-tossed seas. "The search," Obi-Wan said.

"Inevitable, it was," Yoda said. "Safe we are, no longer. Leave, we must."

Bail, red-faced and sweating, appeared at Obi-Wan's side. "I've begun making arrangements. I have contacts in shipping and transit, and my summer staff is headed back to Alderaan already. Some of the children will be safe there. The rest will stay with family, trusted associates, those willing to assume the risks."

"Senator Organa," Obi-Wan said, "I can accompany a smaller group, see them safely-"

"No," Yoda said. The quiet certainty in the old Master's voice was absolute. The children around him, all trying with rattled eagerness to meditate, relaxed visibly. "Confront the Sith we must, Master Kenobi." His ancient eyes held Obi-Wan's. "Face Anakin you will. My task, the Chancellor's destruction is."

Bail's expression softened with sympathy. "Forgive me," he said. "I'm intruding. I'll leave you to discuss your business." He turned to go. Obi-Wan wanted to tell the man that he would be remembered, that he had saved something precious and beautiful, but the words would not come. _Oh, Anakin, _he thought. _Oh, my friend. My son. My brother._

_ How can I do this?_

"Master." His voice was steady. "May I join you?"

Yoda rocked the infant in his arms. It had quieted at last, its skin shading from pinkish-green to a healthy marbled turquoise. "Yes," he said. "Contemplate our futures, let us."

Obi-Wan sat down cross-legged by one of the cots where a gaggle of children sat. Too young to be Padawans, too old for the nursery. Whipid, Mon Cal, Kaleesh, human. He closed his eyes and let himself slip into the dark, rich earth that was the Force. He let his roots spread deep through thirsty soil. There was a howling in the air, a hiss like sand rushing over stone in rivers.

Fire of sunlight on the back of his neck.

RUNE

The Jedi had made a move on Palpatine. The _Jedi _had made a move on _Palpatine. _What's more, they'd fucked it up gloriously. Dooku, however, had disappeared, and Poggle had gone with him. This, combined with the departure of a full two thirds of the Confederate fleet, had not done much for Rune's nerves. It had done less for several others in the High Command. San Hill swung from one of the chandeliers in the Grand Atrium. Shu Mai had been found in her apartments, most of her brain splattered over the rich tapestries of her clan she'd hung to hide the bare walls.

Rune had always liked Shu Mai, but he'd despised San with a singular passion, so he figured it all canceled out. Right now Rune had to worry about Rune. The Confederate strongholds were out of the question. Retreat to Geonosis or Skakoa would be a fool's move with their alliance in tatters. Even Neimoidia wouldn't be safe for much longer. No, he'd take his _Saumae _and head for the Outer Rim, maybe try and unload the warship on the Hutts. He could run for a long time on even the ship's salvage price. He could disappear.

He sat beside his luggage in his suite, attended by a detachment of Neimoidian soldiers in plastoid body armor. The droids weren't to be trusted anymore. He'd had to use his personal overrides to kill the ones on the _Saumae _after they'd rebelled. Half the living crew were dead, slaughtered by the rebellious droids. More of the machines had rampaged through the Twin Suns building, decimating personal guards, slaves, servants, and dignitaries with equal indifference. _It has to be Sidious. He's betrayed us all, the scheming old vrelt. _

"How long until my shuttle arrives?" he snapped, impatience and panic warring in his gut.

"Six minutes, Viceroy," stammered his aide, Basal Aute. The pallid Neimoidian swallowed, his throat working. "Atmospheric conditions are not ideal."

That was a nice, safe, stupid way to put it. Rain lashed against the suite's windows. Lightning snarled like crooked roots across the sky. "You are an idiot," said Rune. "You may be the single biggest idiot I have ever known. My best friend was a tremendous idiot. I come from a long line of idiots. You have earned a towering distinction, Aute."

The aide shifted nervously and wrung his hands. He liked a good fret, Rune had observed.

Out in the hall, someone screamed. It rose higher, higher, higher, and then crescendoed in a sputtering salvo of blaster fire. Rune subtly positioned himself on his settee so that Aute was between himself and the door. He wanted to at least see the other Neimoidian die in a hail of plasma before he himself was shuffled loose the mortal coil. _Is this what you felt like, Nute? At the end?_

The minutes dragged by. Rune took a cocktail of relaxants in an actual cocktail, then smoked a great many kedi-sticks, then had another drink. His guards shifted, paced, sweated. They checked their carbines. Rechecked them. Aute fretted. Finally, like a wobbly beetle bouncing off a window, Rune's insectle shuttle dropped down through the storm and skidded across the landing pad outside the window. A burning _vulture-_class droid fighter flew past a moment later and streaked down into the city below. Rune was already hurrying out onto the rain-slicked balcony, his shouts lost in the howling tempest. The landing ramp was down, his men waiting to pull him up into the shuttle.

The ship, it seemed, could only hold twelve Rune joyfully left Aute standing bedraggled and confused on the platform with a promise that he would send another ship. "I'm not going to send another ship," he told the pilot as the shuttle rose, legs folding into its bulbous belly.

Wind shears buffeted the shuttle as it rose up through the perilous atmosphere. Lightning lit the flight cabin where Rune sat strapped in behind the Neimoidian pilot and his Duros co-pilot. The whole ship shook. Below, the storm-wracked city fell away. Rune Haako, drunk out of his mind and with half of his luggage still piled in the suite below, began to cry.

PALPATINE

The ship was vast, a leviathan of durasteel, a predator of the void. It was miles long, a great sleek dagger glittering against the stars over Coruscant It had arrived, flung across space by Kuati engines, from the shipyards at Fondor just days ago. Crewmen were still shutting up toward its colossal silhouette. The batteries, carrying sufficient ordinance to slag whole continents, were being tuned and loaded with fuel cells of spin-sealed Tibanna gas.

Palpatine had intended it as a gift for his new protege. It was still serving that ostensible purpose, although Skywalker was in no state to receive gifts, but more and more the Chancellor thought of the ship as a knife he could drive into Dooku's smug, charismatic face. He'd christened the thing _Executor _for pity's sake, a moment of ill-advised theatricality breaking through his usual avuncular facade. Well, so what? His scars had earned him the political capital to show a little savagery. No one would think less of him for obliterating the man who had stolen the beloved Senator Naberrie.

The worst part was that the bitch had been his most credible opposing voice. Now he was left listening to Bail Organa and Mon Mothma drone on about labor rights and peace talks, and he looked more like a warmonger than he ever had with Naberrie harping at him. At least that whole farce would be over soon, too. No more approval ratings, no more rallies. He just had to deal with Dooku. He'd expected the Count to show a bit more class, to try to challenge him to a duel or expose his identity on the steps of the Rotunda. Grabbing Padmé Naberrie (along with her not-so-secret bastards) from the 501st legion in a direct boarding action was not exactly the Count's style.

Countering Palpatine's backdoor programs in the droid army _was _more Dooku's speed, although that hadn't been entirely successful. Best estimates stood at a fifth of the army destroyed, another two fifths lost to irreparable glitches and system cascades. Dooku had perhaps two third of the remainder under his immediate command at Serenno. Along, Palpatine was discovering, with a construction project that had beggared not just the Count's homeworld but Geonosis and several other wealthy worlds as well. A fleet. It had to be a secret fleet.

_He's playing a deeper game. _The stakes were obvious. Dooku was attacking Palpatine through Anakin, fracturing the boy's loyalty. Palpatine also suspected revenge as a component. Dooku had always blamed him for Qui-Gon's death, and more lately for Ventress's. _Valid complaints, but I'm still going to feed him to a sarlacc._

Seated alone but for his red-robed guards in the command cabin of his shuttle, Palpatine stared hard at the _Executor. _The ship, now that the Confederate Navy was in more or less full retreat, was going to spearhead an assault on Serenno. The rest of the High Command had fled to the safehouse on Mustafar, but they could wait. Palpatine had sent them a message, as Sidious, telling them to stay in place while he put his grand counterstroke into action. There would be time after Dooku was dealt with for tying up loose ends.

He pressed the com-key for the cockpit. "Take us aboard, pilot," he said. "Inform Grandmaster Skywalker of my imminent arrival."

"Yes sir, Chancellor," the clone pilot replied. "Understood."

The great ship grew in Palpatine's viewscreens.


	9. Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE: I am the Senate

DOOKU

"Can you feel her hunger?"

The child lay on a clean white mat; she was sucking on one of her fists, eyes closed, expression serene. Dooku knelt a short way off. He watched the Senator watch her daughter. They were alone in the great battle station's heart in a spacious cabin set aside for meditation. The walls were polished black durasteel, the ceiling a vidscreen playing a looped exploration of a nebula. Woven mats covered the floor and the soft strains of the Silent Waltz, masterwork of one of Serenno's greatest composers, drifted through the incense-scented air.

"I can feel it," Padmé said. Her voice, and the vibrations of her presence in the Force, held the by now familiar mixture of guilt, awe, greed, and hesitation. "Her mind is so...warm."

"Love makes us secure." Dooku disliked infants. The mind of a child was a wondrous thing, full of lateral thinking and ingenious ability, but an infant was no better than a Geonosian grub wriggling in its jelly caul. "So does hatred. When we touch another through the Force we understand their mind instinctively; language is irrelevant, as is familiarity."

"How does it work?"

"It is the binding principle of all life." Curiosity was damaging the Senator's tenuous connection to the Force, but she had extended herself enough for one day. Dooku rose, his knees aching. "It connects us, defines us, carries our memories onward through the decay of entropy. Its functions are a law, a constant. It cannot be explained."

At first he'd found the Force's mysteries a frustration. When Yoda had explained to him on his sixth birthday that no Jedi had ever found a reason for the Force's existence, a pattern to the individuals in which it manifested its gifts, or a single shred of physical evidence beyond its wielders' abilities, he had been irate. Now he found it comforting, the vast unknowability of it always eddying around him. He extinguished with a wave of his hand the incense he had set to burning on the room's low altar.

Padmé lifted her drowsing daughter into her arms. She opened her loose grey robe and gave the girl her breast. "Anakin is leading the expedition to kill you. I saw it on the news."

"Yes," Dooku said. He knelt at the altar and splashed rosewater on his face, then cleaned his hands. "I expected as much. Palpatine is not a warrior."

"Why are you teaching me?" She didn't look at him. Her attention was for the child in her arms. "What can I possibly learn in two months that my husband hasn't in fifteen years, that Palpatine hasn't in sixty?" She held her despair close to her heart, a knot of festering doubt and terror. "Why did you bring me here?"  
>"I can give you several reasons," Dooku said. "First, I believe that your husband will decline to fire upon my battle station while you are aboard. Second, you are a talented negotiator and manipulator. Third, I wish very badly to kill the man you chose to marry and I consider such an outcome more likely with your involvement."<p>

"What did he do to you?"

"He took something precious that belonged to me." Dooku led Padmé out of the meditation cabin and into the dull gunmetal hall. Geonosian architecture was so utilitarian. _Perhaps Poggle could be made to see his way toward a touch of showmanship. _They walked together down the empty corridor. The station's only occupants were a team of Geonosian engineers and just short of a billion war droids of various makes and models. _Any boarding action will be suicide, any assault a psychotic expenditure of life and materiel. _

The station's capabilities were impressive. Poggle assured him that the superlaser, once the station's many reactors had been brought online, would be quite capable of annihilating a planet. Even with only a twentieth of its planned operational power it would be nothing for the weapon to vaporize shields and boil durasteel plating. No ship in the Republic fleet could hope to withstand the fury of the Death Star. The name was melodramatic, but the station itself was melodrama incarnate. The power to shatter a planet. It gave Dooku nightmares.

"I never said I'd help you stop him." She walked briskly at his side, her daughter still nursing.

"Kill him," Dooku corrected her without breaking stride. "Never tell purposeless lies. Falsehood thrives on intent, not delusion. I intend to murder Anakin Skywalker in cold blood."

"Forgive me," Padmé snapped, "I'm not acclimated to slaughter yet."

She was afraid. "Don't be delusional," Dooku passed through a security door and into a bare-walled atrium where droids were installing light fixtures in the ceiling. "You've been complicit in one of the greatest programs of extermination ever conceived of. Hundreds of billions have died in this war, Senator, and your signature is on their death warrants."

She looked as though she'd tasted something sour. "I don't see it that way."

"Illusion is a tool to wield," Dooku said, "not a set of blinders to don when the world displeases you. If something angers you, then change it."

They passed through another set of doors and onto one of the station's many observation decks. Serenno hung pristine with its three grey moons in the blackness of space, its sun a distant, burning presence. The remnants of the Confederate Fleet formed a loose network of turbolaser batteries and torpedo tubes. _Lucrehulk-_class merchant galleons, dreadnoughts, frigates, and hulking destroyers with experimental ion cannons dominating half their mass. It might be enough, with the half-built station to support it, to break Sidious's stranglehold on the galaxy.

Dooku moved to the observation window, a long sheet of curved duraplast separating him from hard vacuum. He laid a hand against the cold, hard material. "The moment you bemoan your fate you surrender your own agency. You are no longer the anvil." He looked back at Padmé, cradling her sleeping daughter. "You are the hammer."

ANAKIN

The Count had taken his wife. The Count had taken his daughter. The Count had taken his son. He stood on the elevated command bridge of the _Executor, _his hands clenched at his sides, his hood thrown back while he stared out into the starry void. He ground his teeth. Bridge crew and officers toiled in the operations pits to either side of the Captain's Walk. The ship was a metropolis in its own right, its launches and bays loaded with experimental TIE fighters, its miles-long barracks decks packed with battalions of clones whose buzzing thoughts rose up like gas through the vents.

The Chancellor had stayed just long enough to soothe Anakin's apoplectic fit of rage in the wake of Padmé's abduction and the kidnapping of the twins. Several of Anakin's command staff were dead, crushed by the Force at the height of his fury, and one of the ship's skyscraper-sized engines was still malfunctioning in the wake of the outburst. On the bridge's many viewscreens the entirety of the battle fleet, from rust-bucket _Venator_-class assault cruisers to the _Executor'_s escort of savage _Republic_-class Star Destroyers. The sleek, arrowhead-shaped ships cruised sharklike through Coruscant's exosphere. The planet glittered darkly, a fat spider nestled in its own crushing gravity well.

Anakin felt more collected at a ship's helm. It had always been that way, ever since he'd been a boy flying half-junked pod racers for Watto. _I wonder if that old cretin is still alive. _He flexed his mechanical hand. He hadn't thought about Watto in years, but it was easier than thinking of his mother's body mummifying in the Tusken cliff-town, easier than thinking about Padmé speeding through the stars in Dooku's custody. _Did she leave of her own free will? _The thought made him feverish with anger. Now that the furnace in his heart was cracked he could no more staunch the flames than he could kill a star. He felt _everything. _It was glorious. It was terrifying.

The month since the abductions had eaten at him. First there had been a media blitz, a sudden exposé of the Jedi whose secret wife had kept him loyal to the Republic. Then the calls from holonet news agencies looking to scoop his story. Then, finally, whispers of the slaughter in the Temple had silenced the whole clamoring crowd of them. Underground networks on the holonet were playing retrieved footage of Anakin leading clones through the Temple's halls. _I destroyed the records, _he told himself a thousand times. _Nobody knows what happened. Nobody could have found the footage._

That night he dreamed of children running, laughing, in the slave quarter where he'd grown up on Tatooine. He dreamed that his mother's sun-dried body sat at their table, and when he left and went into his room he found it covered in dusty cobwebs, the bedclothes musty, the windows papered over. He took one of the model starfighters from a shelf beside his bed. It crumbled to dust in his hands, but now both his hands were steel and hydraulics whined beneath polished housings. He stumbled out of the hut and into the sunlight, but there was no slave quarter.

A river cut through farming country. Whatever had grown in the fields, something with long, fibrous stalks and bulb-like fruits, had gone to rot. Broken fruit made a mulch on the ground and dead stalks stirred lazily in the hot, slow breeze. The river was shrunken. Qui-Gon sat at its edge. He wore the roughspun clothes and moth-eaten poncho he'd worn when Anakin had first met him a thousand years before on Tatooine. He saw Anakin and raised a hand in greeting.

The bank was steep and treacherous. Anakin made his way down it, clinging to roots and protruding rocks for balance. He sat down beside Qui-Gon, his bare feet dangling just above the river's surface. "I've made some mistakes," he said. He looked down and saw that his hands were covered in blood. Corpses floated by on the sluggish current, scavenger avians riding them like rafts. "Help me, Qui-Gon. I don't know what to do."

"Trust the Force," the dead man said. "Your son is your salvation."

Anakin woke nauseous and sweaty in the darkened confines of his cabin aboard the _Executor. _His com was chiming. He opened the channel. "What is it?"

"Lord Skywalker, the engine room reports ready."

"It's the middle of the night." Black rage coiled around his heart. "What's your name, soldier?"

The man hesitated. Anakin heard him lick his lips. "Lieutenant J-jens Navik, my lord."

Anakin sat up. He ran his good hand over his scalp. "Tell the fleet to set a course for the Serenno system," he said after a long, panicked silence had passed on the channel's other end. "Once you've done that, seal yourself in an airlock."

"S-sir?"

"Seal yourself in an airlock, Lieutenant Navik." He rose and padded to his closet. "Am I understood, or do I need to repeat myself again?"

"N-no, my lord." The man swallowed audibly. "I'll see to it at once."

The line went dead. Anakin dressed himself in silence. _Let him wait, _he thought as he pulled his padded glove over the skeletal fingers of his left hand. _It'll teach him a lesson._

The building rumble of the vast ship's engines was like music in his ears.

OBI-WAN

The shuttle Bail had given him raced like lightning through hyperspace. The ship was a sleek black stealth vessel of the kind the Republic used for deep strike operations. Obi-Wan wonder where a pacifist world like Alderaan had acquired a ship like the _Unpleasant Reminder. _He disliked it. He wasn't fond of flying to begin with, and the _Reminder _was too sensitive and powerful for his tastes. While she was in hyperspace, at least, he could concentrate on his meditation.

He sat in the cramped hold, his mind thrown out like a billowing sail against the nothingness of space. He thought of Qui-Gon, of the Senator, of Mace, and Palpatine, and all the dead masters of the Council. He thought of Coruscant, of its wounded skin, of its starving masses. He thought of Anakin.

Anger fell away. Fear ran through him and out into the stars. He shed his dead skin and fell through a silent storm, another drop of water caught up in the tumult. _I am the rain, _he thought. _Let __the wind drive me where it will._

He saw himself walking along a street on Cato Neimoidia, Anakin at his side. He still wore a Padawan's braid. "Master," the younger man said, "if the war comes here they'll have no way to defend themselves. Neimoidia won't lift a finger, even for its own colony."

Obi-Wan had stopped and looked back along the quiet, muddy street in Vesper City. The colony was a backwater. They had been sent to ferret out a Confederate informant by the name of Dulran, but the Ortolan had vanished a few days after they'd made contact. "We'll do what we can," he said. It seemed the only thing to say.

Two years later they had run together through the fire swamps of Corellia, hunting down a cabal of arms dealers trying to subvert the planet's famous shipyards to the Confederate cause. Anakin had broken his leg and Obi-Wan had dragged him, delirious and feverish, through the bog. He'd arrested the arms dealers himself before calling for extraction. Anakin hadn't even questioned the decision, he'd just chuckled through a haze of painkillers at the outraged expressions on the rodent-like faces of the Drell warmongers.

On the day Anakin had done his first public service announcement for the Chancellor's office they had watched it together in Republic Square and laughed while the crowds cheered the grave young man on all the holoscreens.

_You understood sacrifice too well, _Obi-Wan thought. He straightened up, rubbing at his forehead. _You gave your childhood to the slave huts of Tatooine. You gave your youth to the Temple. You gave your manhood to a secret wife, a dead mother, children you could not afford to love. Maybe Qui-Gon could have shown you how to come back to the light. I couldn't._

He returned to the cockpit and sank into the pilot's crash couch. Hyperspace boiled and rippled outside the viewscreen. Meditation's clarity bled out quickly enough. Obi-Wan felt fear. He felt loss. He felt a gnawing dread at the idea of passing sentence on the one friend left to him. His lightsaber felt like a mountain at his belt. He removed it from its clip and held it in his hands, feeling its weight, judging its heft. _How did you become the sum of us? _He closed his eyes.

_We are all executioners, now._

PALPATINE

Palpatine had never actually walked on the physical Senate floor. The pods spiraled up the walls of the titanic dome, and the Chancellor's podium rose and descended through a spiracle set in the chamber's center. The floor itself was plain grey tile, unremarkable in every way. Palpatine paced the featureless expanse, his footsteps echoing in the empty Rotunda. _This hovel will need renovating, _he thought idly, looking up at the dome's ceiling. _Perhaps a throne room. Byssian marble, erotic statuary, probably Sith Imperial period..._

"You sent for me?" Mas Amedda stood at the mouth of one of the concealed maintenance entries to the Senate floor. He wore a set of ludicrously expensive-looking robes and a petulant frown. The sensory horns draped over his shoulders were flushed an unappealing green. "I was occupied. Senators Tarkin and Shesh-"

"They can wait," Palpatine adopted his most convincing expression of exhausted distress. "There has been an attack." _He doesn't even bother with my title anymore. _

"An attack?" Amedda's brow-ridge rose. He strode toward Palpatine. "Where? When?"

Palpatine smiled. He embraced the Force and the world seemed to slow around him, warping subtly to his will. Mas's eyes widened as realization burned its way through his brain. He turned, robes flying, and raced back toward the door. The Senatorial pod caught him halfway across the blank expanse of the floor. A metric ton of durasteel, bronzium, leather, and repulsor fluid smashed Amedda flat against the gunmetal finish of the chamber's base. The pod itself, released from Palpatine's grip, skidded into the wall in a spray of sparks.

"Just now," said Palpatine, walking past the mangled wreckage of the Chagrian's body. "And right in the Senate Round. Imagine the audacity." He stepped in the dead aide's blood, looking down at the pale bone protruding through those fine silk robes. The wretch had been getting above himself, contemplating blackmail, hobnobbing with the wrong dignitaries.

_ No loose ends, _Palpatine thought. He clasped his hands behind his back.

"Chancellor."

The gravelly croak drew Palpatine's attention to the chamber's far side. He reached out to take hold of two more pods, his influence stretching and sliding through the Rotunda like quick-growing mold. Yoda stood thirty meters distant, a small and wizened figure in the echoing vastness. He wore a robe of brown sackcloth and leaned heavily on his gnarled cane. Palpatine's smile widened. He fed his fear into the furnace of his power. "Master Yoda. How good of you to attend my coronation."

"Too long your reign has been," said the little master. "At an end, it is."

Palpatine howled and two tons of metal came crashing down onto the Senate Floor.


	10. Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN: The Sage & the Master Poisoner

PALPATINE

_Untouched, _Palpatine thought with wonder. The dwarfish creature stood where he had but a moment before, and to his either side the ruined Senate pods smoldered and sparked. A great note resounded from the tensed strings of the living Force. It sent Palpatine staggering back, his robes whipping around him, and the ruined pods flew away from Yoda to strike the walls of the chamber. A high, whining note built in the Supreme Chancellor's ear as he wrapped himself in the frayed veils and rotting vestments of the Dark Side. He snarled, letting cold malice flood his veins, and threw himself like a ravening rancor directly at the diminutive Master.

Yoda moved. Palpatine's hands, crooked into vicious claws, scored glowing gashes in the wall. He wheeled around and sent a pulse of power rushing outward such that dust, furniture, carpeting, and statuary were ripped from the floor and hurled at the Jedi. Yoda, now standing in the center of the chamber, simply stepped aside with a slow motion of his clawed green hands. His eyes were closed, his brow wrinkled in concentration.

"Strike back at me, coward," Palpatine laughed as the storm of trash and debris crashed to the floor, leaving a clean circle around Yoda's still form. "Where was your vaunted restraint on the battlefield? Am I worth more than all the conscripts you and the rest of your order slaughtered on Ryloth, on Trandosha, on Neimoidia?"

Yoda did not answer. He moved again, a single step, hands drifting through the air. A tingle of fear alerted Palpatine at the last moment to the Master's intent. He scrambled crablike to the right as a Senate pod slammed into the floor where he'd stood only a moment before. Plumes of sparks from the wreckage seared white-red afterimages into his retinas. He waved a hand, his sleeve smoldering, and tore into the wiring beneath the floor. Lights flickered out. Pods veered wildly into one another. A dizzying twenty-meter leap took him up into the chaos. He scrambled up onto a shuddering pod as the Senate floor cycled open far below, disgorging the Chancellor's podium and its monolithic support stalk. Yoda was nowhere to be seen, but Palpatine could feel the calm mote of his presence floating nearby. _He will try to use my strength against me. _

Two pods crashed together high above where Palpatine stood. Fire rained down on the seething spiral arms. "I took the greatest of you and broke him with my hands!" he cried, flattening himself against the surface of his pod and squinting out through the sea of whirling metal. The podium was still in ascent. "The future of the Jedi is smeared throughout the Temple's halls! I will have it torn down and turned into a slaver's mart!"

Yoda came up faster than Palpatine could have believed possible. The pod on which he rested clove in two as a small green and brown blur shot by, and Palpatine was forced to launch himself onto a passing pod to avoid plunging back down to the floor. He hurled himself higher in great, greedy bounds, his muscles singing with corrupt power. Yoda stood a dozen meters below him, still as a reflecting pool on the podium's circular floor. The Master's eyes were open. They stared up at Palpatine, ancient and sorrowful and resolved.

"Upon myself, this sin I take," Yoda said, his croaking voice carrying through the clangor of more collisions. "Die you must."

Palpatine screamed with laughter and launched himself skyward, whipping up through empty air, dodging pods with ease in his ravenous ascent. He sent them hurtling down toward the Jedi, missiles cast from the sling of his mind. They burst and broke in staggering profusion until the Round resounded madly to the clamor of their fiery destruction, but Yoda moved in a bubble of stillness from wreck to wreck, climbing steadily as though he traversed not a towering furnace but a set of garden steps. He set foot on a spinning pod, already half-demolished and venting volcanic plasma, and let it carry him to another plummeting hulk from which he jumped a scant meter to a catwalk running below the offices of the Malastare delegations.

Palpatine, still rising like a vengeful wraith, tore at the catwalk's joists and braces with his mind. At last he could unleash himself, could vent his hate upon this hypocritical dwarf. The catwalk groaned, struts tearing free of the Round's smooth walls, and Yoda climbed a swinging rail to take hold with a single clawed hand of a pod that moved in fitful jerks around the cylindrical space. He dropped free to another surface. His eyes never left the Chancellor's.

"You think yourself inexorable," Palpatine frothed, "but you are a husk, Master Yoda! All of your glory is behind you, and now only death remains!"

Flames raged in the growing mountain of trash below the now-tilting Chancellor's podium. Shadows writhed on the walls of the Round. Palpatine lit neatly on a grilled metal walkway near the ceiling. The network of suspended catwalks was intended for the press, but he had often used them to spy on closed proceedings when he had been an aid to old Senator Bibble, before the old fool had contracted a tragic case of slow, deliberate, untraceable poisoning.

Palpatine made a fist and the flames leapt higher, chasing Yoda in his deliberate climb. Amorphous shapes formed, dissolved, and reformed in the snarling fire. Teeth of efflorescent plasma snapped at the hem of the climbing Master's robe. _He is nothing, _Palpatine thought. There was a headache mounting at his temples and he drew on the pain for strength, nursing like a child at a swollen teat. His mauled lips twitched over his etched and eroding teeth. _He is an insect._

He sent shadows to swirl and slaver around the Master. He raised up great clots of twisted durasteel adrip with molten flame and hurled them like javelins at his enemy. He shrieked with the voices of the innumerable dead, and he gathered his mantle close around himself until he smoked with acrid poisons and unholy vapors. Still, though, Yoda climbed. Veins bulging in his throat, Palpatine redoubled his assaults, but to no avail. Yoda stepped on a flake of drifting ash, and from there to the rail of the catwalk. He stepped to the walk itself like a leaf on the wind, as though he cared nothing for his destination. "Inward, I turn my eyes," Yoda murmured. "Water in the storm, am I."

Palpatine ground his teeth and unleashed hate. Lightning snarled and sizzled around them, lines of blue-white loathing that crawled along the catwalk and whipped bright and bestial at the naked air. Yoda came onward, slower now, his motions graceful and incredibly purposeful. Forked tongues of lightning charred his robe and blistered his skin, but they did not touch him. "Die!" Palpatine redoubled his efforts, spittle flecking his lips and running down his chin. "Die! Die!"

Yoda made a gesture as though he were pushing a curtain aside. The storm died out in an instant, though the stink of ozone lingered in the air. "At an end, this is," he said. The Master quickened his pace as Palpatine, his fingertips smoking, his vision swimming, shuffled back.

Terror jolted through the Chancellor's system like a drug. _Yes, _he whispered to himself, _yes. Let is subsume you. Let desperation give you strength against this old, bent thing. _"Please," he fell back, gripping at the rails, injecting a sick man's quaver into his voice while ash floated around him and below a lake of fire raged and roared. "Please, I surrender. I renounced my office! I'll do anything!" Below, one of the last pods left aloft crashed into the podium's support beam. The great structure plunged into the maelstrom, raising a plume of sparks and glowing refuse a hundred meters high.

Yoda advanced, step by silent step. Palpatine cowered, scrambling along the walk until his back hit another rail. He palmed the hilt of his lightsaber, hidden in his sleeve. "I beg of you, spare my life! Let me live!" He felt the beginnings of a Force grip closing around his body and, howling in terror, mustered the only thing he could think of. He wove a cheap illusion of light and dust, a conjuror's trick as low as any carnival hack's. He superimposed Anakin Skywalker's terrified face over his own.

Yoda faltered. It was only for an instant, but Palpatine felt the stutter in the old Master's calm. He whipped forward in a snakelike charge, his body boneless and low to the ground in a full-out sprint, and whipped his lightsaber around in a one-handed slash that cut through most of the walkway, the railing, and the old Master's stomach. Yoda's eyes widened in surprise. A few drops of mud-colored blood flew through the air as Palpatine reeled onward, out of control.

The Chancellor spun around, severing another rail with a wild swing, teeth bared in a sickly grin, but Yoda was gone. His brown robe, empty now, drifted down toward the fires below. Palpatine scanned the ruined Round frantically for any sign of the Jedi. He raced to the walk's opposite rail and stared downward. The fires raged. The Senate pods were gone, subsumed into the lake of flame. Palpatine deactivated his lightsaber and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

He had done it.

He had succeeded where a thousand generations of Sith had failed.

The Jedi Order was dead.

Darth Sidious threw back his head, exultant, and roared.

ANAKIN

The _Executor _leapt out of hyperspace like a junkyard vrelt loosed from its chain. Its vast sublight engines shook the deck with their warmup burn. Anakin had just turned from the instrument readouts to look out at the dun sphere of Serenno floating in the void when his ship, still powering up its combat systems, died. A green sun rose. The viewports polarized fully, shutting out the apocalypse of light, and Anakin fell back over a safety rail, his stomach twisting into a compacted knot, as the death-shrieks of six thousand naval personnel clawed at the borders of his mind. His cloak snagged on a stanchion and the cloth jerked tight around his throat as he dangled, legs kicking, above the crew pit.

_-darling, I didn't-_

_ -they never meant for us to go home-_

_ -I need you I need you I need you-_

_ -the box in the 'fresher has bandages I can put it back on-_

_ -save me-_

They screamed, their essences blasted free of their bodies, and the great ship groaned as Anakin swung like a pendulum, choking blindly on his own acrid vomit. He saw their faces, felt their pain fading into the numbing, septic terror of an open wound. The clones wailed as one through the onslaught of singular voices, their lament a Mandalorian chant deprived of its mother tongue. Anakin spat, darkness ringing his vision, the fingers of his good hand fumbling at his belt for his lightsaber.

The ship's gravity generators failed just as the blackness began to close in. Anakin floated free, globules of his own bile drifting from his purpling lips. He called his lightsaber to his hand and slashed through his cloak in one cut. Bodies drifted all around him. Some were still kicking. Others had been pulped by the force of the great ship's deceleration. _The battle station. _Sidious's spies had reported some secret Geonosian weapon protected by Dooku's fleet. Anakin ground his teeth, ignoring the screams of his bridge crew.

It took him only a few minutes to right himself in the free-floating nightmare of the bridge, claw his way back up to the captain's walk, and start toward the turbolift. He passed the corpse of his navigator, a red-faced woman named Selik, floating near a bank of dead screens. "You have the bridge," he said. He kicked off from the screens and sailed into the open turbolift shaft. Blackness gaped below him. He could feel the cold suction of a hull breach somewhere far down in the vast ship's guts. It was a long way to the hangar bay, but the magnetic atmosphere fields were still live, and gravity was active. Clone pilots were scrambling to their TIEs. Anakin dropped out of the shaft and started toward his own craft, a cutting-edge prototype Palpatine had given him before that dreadful night. _"It's only a birthday present, Anakin,"_ the old man had said. _"Let me give you this small thing, when you've done so much for me."_

The ship had the ball-like cockpit of a TIE, but its engines had been hand-crafted by Kuat's finest engineers and its solar-paneled wings were bent inward top and bottom, giving it a cowled silhouette. It also had a longer chassis with room enough for shield generators and a compact hyperdrive. Anakin lashed out with the Force, crushing and tossing the clones between him and the fighter. More scrambled to avoid him as he stalked across the deck and climbed the ladder on the side of the fighter's docking station. The hatch was open. He stepped onto the chassis and lowered himself down into the dark, cramped cockpit with its buzzing instruments and low-light readouts.

His hands gripped the control yoke. The fighter's engines howled to life with their characteristic scream. Anakin closed his eyes. It felt right as he rocketed out through the chaos of the docking bay and through the mag-shield into the embattled void. The comm feeds crackled to life with screams, grim reports, and desperate pleas for orders flooding in from the other ships in the fleet. He killed the channels. Droid fighters rose up around him. He reduced them to slag, spinning and whirling without effort, his fighter's lasers raking their metal hulls into ragged ruins.

_I am a drop of water in a storm. _His hands danced over the controls. He closed his eyes, letting the Force guide his hands. It blazed up in him. _I am ash on the wind._

Anakin reached out through the blackness with the Force, questing for her, for the woman he had sacrificed everything to be with. Her presence wavered somewhere deep within the metal heart of Dooku's monstrosity. She withdrew at his touch and for an instant he could see her face before him, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. Then she was gone. The memory, though, remained. Black rage welled up in Anakin's heart. _She's hiding from me. _He opened his eyes. Dooku's weapon loomed large before him. Even as he watched, his viewport polarized to blackness again as the great station fired its weapon. Even through the polarization he could see it, a great lance of green light that speared one of the _Venator_ -class star destroyers that had been assigned to escort Anakin's flagship.

The star destroyer exploded, gutted from stem to stern. Anakin looked away. He reached out again, probing more deeply this time into the station even as he juked and rolled through thickening clouds of _vulture_-class fighters. He did not look for Padmé. Dooku's familiar presence welled up all around him. He could sense the Count's satisfaction over undercurrents of anger and impatience. He could almost see the urbane old man, debonair in one of his black suits and elegant half-capes.

_Come and find me, Anakin, _Dooku's voice purred, half real and half imagined. _I've been waiting a long time for this._

Anakin screamed in rage, sending his TIE through a vicious roll that tore at the edges of his consciousness and edged his vision with black. He raked the void with green laser fire, pulping droids, craving a more meaningful release, and then plunged like a comet toward the surface of the great false moon.

JANGO

_Slave I _left hyperspace a few thousand kilometers from the dying wreckage of the _Executor. _The great ship turned slowly in the black sea of space, venting a tremendous geyser of flame, wreckage, and gases. _Unexpected._ Jango had silenced the hyperspace proximity alarm. Boba slept sitting in the copilot's seat. Jango unbuckled his own restraints and stood, stretching.

"Take him to Dxun," Jango told the ship, and then he crossed the narrow cockpit and stepped into the airlock. The pressure door sealed behind him. He looked through the tiny viewport at his sleeping son, still buckled into his crash webbing. He donned his helmet and activated its seals. "Cede control of all shipboard systems to the warriors there, authorization code Krayt pearl, scalper, void."

A diode in the cramped airlock blinked amber in acknowledgment. The outer airlock blew and Jango was sucked out in a rush of crystallizing oxygen. He soared in silence through the blackness, knowing as he did that (Jango)'s plan was working better than they could have imagined. The death of the _Executor, _however it had happened, meant that every holo-cam in the fleet was now searching desperately for something else to transmit home. What could be better than the triumphant crusader, General Fett, storming the enemy fleet in his outdated armor?

_Draw attention to yourself. Make it visible. Make it big. Fight loud, not smart._

The first of the _vulture_-class interceptor droids cut through the void toward Jango. He activated the short-range jammer on his gauntlet_, _blocking the droids' targeting hardware. Lasers strobed through the dark around him. Missiles flashed past, vapor trails crystallizing in their wake. He fired a cluster of rockets from his shoulder-mounted launchers and then rolled, boosters firing, through the drifting wreckage that was all that remained of the first three droid fighters. The Republic's TIEs were swarming out to meet their mechanized opposite numbers. They buzzed like gnats around one another, stabbing with blasters that flashed red and green in the void.

In the distance, Dooku's space station hung vast and bone-grey in the void. Jango kept an eye on his helmet display as _Slave I _reversed its course. It took a terrible three minutes for the ship's computer to plot its course, and then it vanished from Jango's sensors. He breathed a deep sigh of relief inside his armor. He had been a ghost for years. His (rotting corpse's) legacy was safe now, and headed for the last battle camp of the true Mandalorian nation.

He was free to die a glorious death.

(Again).

"To war," Jango said, and he plunged headfirst into the vast swarm of droid fighters that had come to meet him.

PADME

"He isn't dead," Padmé said as she watched the _Executor'_s death throes from Dooku's private observation deck. The ship was venting miles-long plumes of atmosphere and wreckage. "I can feel him. He's coming."

"Well," Dooku said, shrugging, "I had to try." He took a boma fruit from the dish by the mantelpiece and bit into it. Juice stained his beard. "That ship of his was just too tempting."

"He's angry," Padmé said. Her voice sounded small to her own ears. Shmi and Qui-Gon were safe in a lightning-fast drone shuttle equipped with nurse droids and hard-programmed with the coordinates of a secret CIS base. She was as secure as anyone could be, protected by miles of decking and a seething hive of battle droids. _Why do I feel so afraid?_

"Use your fear," Dooku said. "Remember, it is yours to wield. Shrink down within it. Hide, and find strength in the darkness."

They had practiced the technique exhaustively. Padmé took a shallow breath, letting herself hyperventilate, and allowed the waters of the Force to close over her head. She felt Anakin's grasping presence fade as he lost track of her and his attention shifted to the Count. Dooku smiled thinly. "Good," he said. "You have your knife?"

"I'm a good shot," she said, her voice buzzing. Her hand flickered before her eyes as she held up the vibro-knife Dooku had given her. Seizing the Force made it hard to discern reality from illusion. "I could use a blaster."

"We've been over this," said the Count. "He must not sense the attack until it is too late. A blaster would only alert him to your presence prematurely. As it is, you must wait until an opportune moment presents itself, and then you will strike." He looked back out through the viewscreen and into the dark where lines of light grew and faded between far-away ships. "He's moving quickly."

Padmé sank down deeper into the unfamiliar currents of the Force. She moved to stand near Dooku, her throat tight. _Oh, Anakin. _Again and again she saw the Temple halls, the children slashed and brutalized. She pressed a fist to her mouth, tears threatening, and gripped the vibro-knife tightly. _I'm so sorry, my love._

Once, a long, long time ago, they had laughed by the lake at Varykino and there had been nothing between them but the light.


	11. Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Void Dragon

ANAKIN

He plunged toward one of the space station's docking bays, a deadly missile armed and racing at full speed toward its destination. With the Force he reached out and tore couplings free, smashed servos, and crushed droid mechanics. The shields flickered, reversing their polarity, and his TIE flitted through them as easily as an errant dust mote. He pulsed the fighter's reverse thrusters, slowing as monumental architecture blurred by to his either side. The bay was cavernous and empty except for a few repair and maintenance droids. Anakin slowed and set the TIE down in the shadow of a monstrous docking crane. He climbed out of the fighter while its tortured engines cut out.

Dooku's presence had grown stronger. It bore no resemblance to the aura of cobwebs and whispers that surrounded Palpatine; instead it was like a heady wine's bouquet, dark and disarming. Anakin could almost feel the knives poised at his back. He could feel his children, too. They flickered at the edge of his perceptions, two frightened points of light somewhere in the station's outer skin. _She's here somewhere. _He looked back at the dueling fleets beyond the narrow mouth of the docking bay. Lances of hard light linked burning hulls across the black. The _Executor _turned slowly like the corpse of some colossal seagoing beast.

Maintenance droids craned their skeletal faces in Anakin's direction. Somewhere, an alarm began to blare.

DOOKU

Skywalker had torn a hole in the Death Star's defenses like a krayt dragon tearing through the walls of a mud hut. Now he seethed through the great battle station, a fissile point of rage collapsing infinitely back in upon itself. Geonosians met him and died. Battle droids were crushed by the force of his illimitable hatred, by his bottomless hunger. All paths led to violence.

Dooku sat cross-legged in the center of a half-finished meditation grotto, surrounded by murmuring fountains and unplanted beds where shu-fronds and crystal trees would grow. A tiny river, all recycled water, ran through the artificial landscape. A single pair of boma trees, twisted and stunted, branches bare, shaded the Count with their dwarfish limbs as he wet his razor in the metallic-tasting waters. With great precision Dooku drew the blade along the gaunt lines of his cheek. Silvery-grey hairs floated away on the river's placid surface. Padmé had hidden herself somewhere among the piled crates of fertilizer and the stacks of hyperbaric micro-chambers in which the garden's seeds were held. Dooku could barely feel her. The woman would have made a talented apprentice, given time.

He had done what he could. She was, fortunately, a tangle of conflicting emotions so toxic that she could not help but immerse herself like a drowning swimmer in the Dark Side. A few more months of such unrestrained sorcery and corruption would set in. She would not live to see it, though. _Anakin will kill her. His grief will buy me an instant. Or she will kill him, and then she is of no use to me._

"He's coming," came the woman's voice.

Dooku drew his lightsaber. "Thank you, my dear," he said to the shuddering air. He held the weapon loosely, unlit. He remembered the day he had made it, the weeks of preparation under Yoda's tutelage. The old Master had watched him work with a furrowed brow. _Dark, this old tradition is, _he'd warned the young count of Serenno. _Warriors, we are not meant to be._

The first time he had kindled its ruby blade, he had known that Yoda was right. Oh, he had excelled. More than that, he had proved himself a virtuoso with the blade, but he had seen the dual truths in his Master's statement. The blade, Yoda had meant, was too violent a symbol for the Order. Dooku had seen deeper, though; he had seen the weakness of the weapon, the limitations of scale inherent in the curved hilt of the relic. There were more potent swords to bring to hand.

The Count inhaled. The Dark Side welled up around him like a symphony's brass section blaring in the fibers of his being. Serpents wrapped themselves around his trembling limbs and whispered secrets, slick and meaningful, into his ears. A sun kindled in the dark behind his eyes. New horizons warped and burst like flowering fruit, overripe and trembling. He saw the dark mouths gaping at the heart of the galaxy.

The world was was light and sound and water.

PADME

It made her feel like she had swallowed a bag of kreetles. Her stomach churned. Her throat, feverish and raspy, itched like fury. Her skin crawled. Every moment made it easier. Not less horrible, but easier to understand. There were currents in her, waves of love and fear that crashed together and made roaring riptides, sucking thought out, out, out into the black where her darkest depths waited, toothy and monotonous. Her palm was slick on the rough grip of the vibro-knife.

It wrapped her up and drew her down, a sucking whirlpool that drained her even as her veins thrilled with sickening power. She walked the margins of the Count's unfinished grotto, a shadow among shadows in the cold light of the battle in the void. For a moment Anakin's mind had been upon her, starved and wild and hungry, but there was safety in fear. She'd hidden herself, and now everything was in position. She had planted the beacon carefully.

By the time Anakin arrived, it would all be over.

OBI-WAN

The battle was chaos, but he was at peace. The _Unpleasant Reminder _coasted above the orbital plane of the engagement, Serenno's smallest moon still between it and the massive battle station the _Reminder_'s sensors had picked up when she had dropped out of hyperspace. They'd picked up something else, too. Obi-Wan let out a long, weary breath.

A red diode blinked on and off on the ship's communications panel. A Senate emergency signal beacon. It was coded to his personal frequency.

Padmé.

Obi-Wan locked onto the signal and put the _Reminder _on a course for the station. Outside, the fire-pierced void was silent.

ANAKIN

They could not bar his way or stay his hand. Blasters rose and spoke. Pupils dilated in terror at his approach. They threw up walls of flesh and steel against him. Anakin Skywalker raged. Like a beast he hurled himself down echoing corridors, traveling in monstrous bounds, and his lightsaber left glowing durasteel and smoking meat behind him. It felt like tearing into a good nerf steak, like ripping through sinew with his teeth and worrying at the meat until its tangy membranes separated with a satisfying ripping noise. Geonosians boiled up out of vents like the insects they were. Their sonic blasters sputtered and whined.

He killed them. Their bodies burst in his mind's grasp. Their delicate wings were shredded in hurricane winds. Their own weapons-fire pulped their exoskeletons and burst their veins. In an unfinished loading turbolift shaft they swarmed him, hundreds upon hundreds of them piling in as he launched himself from support to catwalk to support in a series of dizzying leaps. Below, they were a storm of pinched red-brown faces and a growing buzz that drove daggers into Anakin's temples. He struck their outflung arms from their bodies, but still they pressed on. They carried no weapons.

_Just drones, _he thought to himself as the fire in his breast leaked out of him in nauseating torrents. There was always more to burn. Up and up he clawed and leapt, the workers, engineers, and maintainers of the ship scrabbling desperately after him even as their swarm-mates were crushed and broken against the walls of the shaft. Anakin screamed. He screamed until his throat was raw, until his whole body vibrated. His false arm flew through inelegant forms, death trailing behind the blue-white arc of his saber.

He cut his way free of the shaft, his vision blurred and bloody red, the servos of his droid arm seizing and overheating. The vacant lift was an abattoir behind him, its occupants heaped dead in tumbled mountains. Anakin found himself in a long, curving corridor walled in durasteel. Panels hung askew or leaned against the walls, waiting to be bolted into place. Exposed wiring bulged like fat serpents from the empty spaces in the alloy. Girders stood like bones across the dark pits of the great station's nuclear heart.

Anakin suppressed a burst of manic laughter. He lost his balance, fell, and rolled onto his back. A groan escaped him. _They're in here somewhere, _he told himself as he stared up at the unfinished ceiling. _He took them, and I'll take them back. _He got to his feet, his dead arm still opening and closing of its own free will, and leaned for a moment against the cool durasteel of the wall paneling. He opened the casing on his arm, killed the actuators, and reset the system. This was where meaning lived. Not in words, not in the Force, but in things he could control. The cockpit of a fighter. The crew of a starship. The innards of a droid.

He flexed his durasteel fingers. There was a strange ringing sound in his ears. He bent and carefully removed his boots, setting them aside from the center of the hall. He stood, his blood-splattered reflection livid in the polished paneling. He turned away from it, flanked by himself In stockinged feet he padded down the winding way, lightsaber unlit in the palm of his living hand, and the dead one whining, flexing, crushing, but in voluntary lockstep with the beating of his heart.

JANGO

Vengeance came in many forms, Jango reflected. He had killed a score of sentients for crossing him, and more than he could count in fights more or less fair. He had hunted thousands across the galaxy. Clients had betrayed him. Armies had hunted him. Once, before he'd been split into a hundred million shards, he had dueled the finest gunman on Corellia in an alleyway and walked away with two holes burned through his chest and the dead man's blaster holstered at his belt.

On Ord Mantell he'd scalped the warchief of a Nikto crime hive in the middle of his own bar. On Duro he'd found a Trandoshan slaver who had left him drifting in the cold, his ship disabled by ion cannon fire, and he had slit her throat with her own knife. Except he hadn't. Not really. That man had traded his life for a son and an army, and then he had died a dozen deaths. The thing floating now in his armor was a clone, a replica pumped full of chemical memories.

He turned slowly as he drifted toward Serenno's gravity well. The battle was behind him now, a swarm of ants trading jabs of light in the black. Plumes of oxygen hissed from his ruptured armor. A vulture droid, its navigation matrices malfunctioning, had crashed into him at full speed. Already his vision had begun to narrow. Breathing was torture.

The voices of his clone brothers (his voice) hissed through his failing helmet-mounted comlink system. They were dying by the thousands, swallowed in seas of radioactive flame, drowned in the vast uncaring seas between the stars, and crushed by ruined bulkheads.

_Be strong, brother._

_ There will be revenge._

_ We hold our name close._

_ We do not forget._


	12. Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Ill-Made Knight

DOOKU

Skywalker came through the door like a wraith. He moved at a dead sprint, his face a mask of brownish-red Geonosian blood. His eyes found Dooku's. The Count stood, the dead wind of the Death Star's ventilated atmosphere cold against his clean-shaven face. "Young Jedi," he said, his voice ringing from the walls with a deep, liquid power amplified by the currents of the Dark Side he had wrapped around himself. "I think you'll find-"

A wave came. It was like the great breakers that had crashed sometimes on the beach near his mother's summer home. It came not in the ocean but in the Force, a dark swell of ruin and anger that stripped away his careful defenses like a pack of dogs, like a hurricane, like a fusillade of blaster fire. It was the pounding, petulant, unloving sea given voice. He staggered back, his words gone, his aura of dark power cut to ribbons, as Skywalker ran barefoot like a savage through the unfinished garden. The younger man splashed through the meditation river and, gaining the far bank, attacked with a blood-curdling shriek.

Dooku ignited his saber and parried the younger man's first two blows, moving like a sleepwalker as he struggled to regain his equilibrium. He felt like a man on a high-wire, his body swaying over an abyss of roaring black. The third strike went through his belly like a bar of white-hot steel. The fourth laid his breast open. The fifth darted in just under his ribcage. It severed his spine. He inhaled sharply as he fell. His arms failed to respond when he tried to break his fall. The back of his head hit durasteel, hard. He saw light.

Skywalker loomed over him, that mask-like snarl still etched deep into his hungry features. "Where are they?" he grated.

Dooku stared at the young man. _There is a fire in him, _he thought, _but it is not the danger. The danger is what comes after, what comes when the coals are dead and the ash has been shoveled out. What remains when the light is gone?_

"Gone," Dooku said. _She never struck. The coward._

Skywalker, waxy-faced, seized him by the front of his robe and dragged him to the meditation river. Dooku watched the trails of blood his limp heels left on the durasteel. The young Jedi stared at Dooku for a moment, then threw him unceremoniously into the water. Muddy currents closed over Dooku's head, but for an instant he could see Skywalker through the murmuring surface of the river.

The Jedi was a skeletal thing, his body charred black, one arm a festering absence in the world, the other little more than skin stretched hard across old bones. His lightsaber, still burning, was the color of a dying sun. The ghosts of children followed in his ghastly train, and the only light he cast was the light of his fissile eyes. Red. Terrible and red.

Behind him came a woman dressed in black and bearing like a votive in her hand a knife.

It had all come to nothing in the end. His schemes, his desperate gambits. Palpatine had outmatched him at every turn. _I should have seen it sooner, _he thought. Bubbles streamed from his nostrils. _I shouldn't have fought so hard._

_ I was always a joke to him._

Dooku opened his mouth and slipped away with the current.

OBI-WAN

The bay was a minor one, positioned carefully away from the main offensive architecture of the massive battle station. The _Reminder_'s sophisticated sensors found it without too much difficulty. Obi-Wan docked in silence, setting the _Reminder _down beside the sleek Neimoidian shuttle in the tiny oblong bay. Attendant droids swarmed out to connect fuel lines and service the rapidly cooling nacelles. Obi-Wan debarked and crossed the echoing deck to the shuttle's lowered boarding ramp.

Inside the hold a pair of nanny droids cradled the sleeping children in their padded arms. They turned their comfortingly average synthskin faces toward Obi-Wan and cooed inquisitively. He paid them no mind. The Senator's beacon was underneath the pilot's couch, its lone blue diode blinking. He removed it, deactivating its magnetic seal, and sat down on the padded surface. He held the little beacon in his hands.

He couldn't sense Padmé, though he'd tried to reach out into the roiling maelstrom of the Death Star's inner chambers. _Is this all that remains of you, my friend?_

They had journeyed together from Theed to the Senate Round. They had worked together to escape Tatooine. He had counted her among his few friends, had kept the secret of her dalliance with Anakin against all his better judgment, and now he had no way to know whether or not she had paid the price for his foolishness.

The beacon let out a single hitch-pitched _beep _and Padmé's image appeared in miniature atop its minute projection plate. "Help me, Obi-Wan," the senator's flickering hologram whispered. "You're the only one left that I can trust."

It settled on him, then. _She's dead. _

"I knew you'd come. It's too late for me, but you can still save my children. They shouldn't pay for my mistakes." She paused, and even in miniature he could see the tears in her eyes. "I've rigged the shuttle to your personal clearance code. Take them away, Obi-Wan. I know you're here to face him, but I'm begging you to save my children instead."

Obi-Wan had spent decades mastering his emotions. He had labored under Qui-Gon's tutelage to accept serenity, to purge himself of want and need. It had never come easy to him. Now he saw what a waste it had all been. What had his control done but distance him from Anakin and from the others in the Order? The young man had needed a friend, a father, not some distant arbiter of abstract morality. The Jedi teachings had failed him. Somewhere, lost in their long history, they had traded peace for stoicism, and their hearts had withered for it.

The Senator's image winked out.

Obi-Wan looked back at the children and their caretakers, back to the narrow airlock which still stood open on the bay. He could sense Anakin's presence. The other man was a wound in the world, an abscess bloated up with pus and foulness.

He was gone.

Obi-Wan sealed the shuttle and prepped it for flight.

ANAKIN

He was staring down at the old man's quiescent face, naked without its silvery beard, when a low, clicking whir drew his attention. He turned, drawing again from the new wells of power that were opening within him, and something hot and sharp drew a line across his throat. The pain was bitter; nauseating. He jerked back, howling. Blood sheeted down his chest to soak his shirt as he swung his lightsaber in a killing arc. Flesh parted. Bones superheated and burst.

She toppled to the floor in a pile of dirt and chemical manure spilling out from a tangle of torn bags. He had nearly bisected her, but there was life in her eyes. A little firefly glow. It lingered as she stared up at him, and in the stillness of the moment Anakin Skywalker felt the last thread snap.

"Murderer," she husked through bloody lips. The wound, though, held his shivering gaze. Her organs pulsed and slithered. Glistening. Charred meat smoked in the temperature-controlled environment of the battle station.

He raised a hand to the cut she had given him. Shallow. It would bleed, but there was no danger. "No," he said. _No._

She laughed bloodily, completely, and then her head fell to the side and she was still. She had run out of herself in rivers and in lakes, and a halo of dark redness grew around her skull. Her sweat-damped hair was pressed across her cheek.

Anakin knelt and took her in his arms. He pressed his face into the hollow of her neck. He lifted her and, dead-eyed, left the ruined garden and the old man in the simulacral river. Doors were torn screaming from their mounts at his approach. Droids were crushed like discarded cans. Geonosians fled, or stayed and died in the whirlwind that built and roared around Anakin Skywalker. Wall paneling crumpled and shrieked. Wires tore and sparks spilled out like burning stars.

Blood from the shallow cut on the side of Anakin's neck ran down to mingle with Padmé's. Her head lolled against his chest. She was heavy.

She was dead.

The Death Star was a labyrinth. Its corridors folded back on themselves in tangled skeins. A hundred identical guard stations, unmanned and empty. Cell blocks gaping like hungry mouths. The storm slackened as Anakin's wrath drained away. The walls shook and shivered where he passed. Lights flickered. Some died. His living fingers dug hard into his wife's shoulder as he carried her like some priceless thing into a service shaft, a dark slot in the heart of the great machine. The sounds of pursuit faded behind them.

He walked across narrow catwalks spanning gulfs of blackness. Hydroponic tanks. Grey water reprocessing stations. He ripped maintenance doors from their hinges, twisted palm locks into unrecognizable messes of metal and wiring, and passed deeper, deeper, ever deeper into the dark. At last, when his legs had grown weak and his shoulders ached with the burden of Padmé's corpse, he emerged from a half-built radiation lock into the echoing cathedral of the station's reactor core. Two great flanged durasteel towers, one sprouting from the floor, the other from the ceiling, met at the center of a vast, empty sphere. Lightning snarled and snapped between the poles. Malevolent-looking architectures gnarled the paired apparatuses.

The emptiness was bathed in green-blue light. Anakin limped out onto the curving floor, a mote of dust in an ocean of nothing. He kept his eyes on the reactor, on its artificial sunlight, so much brighter than the twin sunrises on Tatooine. A sob sent a tremor up his spine. He fell to his knees, Padmé spilling from his arms, and like a supplicant he knelt bathed in unclean light while a symphony of breach alarms roared and thundered in his ears.

The clone boarding parties found him there the next day, silent, skin red and peeling, half-blind with sunstroke, when the maimed and dying Archduke surrendered his battle station to the victorious Republic.

YODA

The pod dropped down through the planet's turbulent atmosphere. Clouds swirled outside its tiny porthole. Yoda fell with it. He sat cross-legged on the oversized crash couch, his breathing slow and purposeful. It had taken an enormous effort of will to return to Organa's waiting speeder and retreat back to the Senator's apartment. There Yoda had made his last arrangements. The surviving students would be hidden, all records of their existence expunged. The academy records left in Bail's care would be destroyed.

The Order was at an end. He had failed in its final accounting. All his years of meditation, all his careful shepherding of young minds. It was over. Now he descended toward a world he had not visited in centuries, a broken being wrapped around a wound not just of body but of spirit. Palpatine had not killed him, but the duel had been his last. Just to stand in the same room with such raw, suppurating evil had touched the old Master's soul too deeply for it to ever be cleansed or undone. The wound in his belly, too, would never really heal. The cane he had carried for so long as an aid and a friend was now a grim necessity.

The pod slowed, braking thrusters firing. The clouds slid past and grey light filtered through the windows. Below, a jungle spread out vast across a rainy continent in a grey-green sea. Life thrummed and throbbed down there, beneath the clouds. Yoda put a clawed hand to the porthole, pressing his palm against the cold, glassy surface. A half hour later the pod slipped without incident through the canopy and into the moss-shrouded jungle. The door hissed open and hot, fetid air rushed in. The world was alive with the sounds of animals crying, hooting, bellowing, and shrieking.

Yoda stepped out onto the sodden turf, his cane sinking into the muck. Gnarled trees surrounded him, looming like weary giants. Avians flitted through the muggy dusk. He closed his eyes and passed a hand over his face. The ache in his belly throbbed and pulsed, a constant reminder of his failure. He sighed. "Hmmm," he said to himself, "done, it is. Dwell on it, no more will I."

He walked away into the hissing drizzle. The jungle swallowed him.

PALPATINE

They walked together at the head of the funeral procession, chancellor and knight. Skywalker limped along numbly. His eyes were dead and cold, still healing from exposure to the Death Star's reactor. His skin had a pallid, sickly cast to it. The coffin, resting on repulsors and drawn by a pair of noble tusk cats arrayed in black barding, came silently in their wake. The people of Theed lined the great thoroughfare as the Senator's friends and family accompanied her body through the lamplit night. Candles blazed in their hands.

Naboo was deep in mourning. _So tragic, _Palpatine thought, looking back at the woman's angelic face. She wore a black burial gown that hid what Skywalker had done to her. _Necessary, though. _Her death bound the younger man to him forever, and it bound the galaxy to Skywalker. They would never stop loving him for his bravery in the wake of his beautiful, brilliant wife's murder at the hands of the villainous Count Dooku.

The great palace of Theed was darkened in mourning, a black hill of spires and domes silhouetted against the moon. The queen and her ministers walked with the procession, but it was Palpatine who held the father's place beside the grieving widower. The galaxy, it seemed, awaited only his announcement of assumption of the imperial mantle. He watched them sidelong from the shadows of his hood. Dooku was dead. A fair maiden, martyred brutally in service to the Republic, dominated the entire galactic news cycle. Skywalker had nothing left but their connection.

Nothing left but Kenobi.

The procession passed canals where paper lanterns bobbed in gentle currents. One of the tusk cats dropped a steaming pile of dung, quickly shoveled up by its wary minders, on the boulevard. The people gathered along the street and watching from windows, doorways, and rooftops wept to see their precious Padmé carted toward her funeral pyre. It was to happen at the roaring falls. A bier of black marble waited on an overlook. At the burial site the Naberrie women, weeping mother, spinster aunts, young sisters pale and stricken, gaggle of old crones resigned to constant death, took Padmé from the coffin and laid her gently, reverently, on the bier.

Blue-robed priests from whatever backwater cult collected dues in Theed emerged from the throngs of mourners to sing Padmé's praises. Her mother stood and related a drearily boring story about the girl's childhood in the countryside. Tears glistened in the aging woman's eyes.

"You've been strong, Anakin," Palpatine said. He gripped the younger man's hand briefly. "I know that this has been a challenge for you. I know how much you loved her.

"There's only one thing left to do."

He clenched his teeth, grinding them. His false hand twitched in its masking glove. "Obi-Wan," he said, and the venom in his tone nearly brought a smile to Palpatine's lips.

"Obi-Wan," the Chancellor agreed, sorrowfully.

OBI-WAN

Organa's men took the children on a nameless moon near Alderaan. They delivered a message from the Senator himself explaining the specifics of their relocation. Obi-Wan hardly heard them. He could still feel it, the wave of insane hatred that had swept out from the Death Star mere moments after his departure from it. The holonet had its stories about Padmé's death, but he knew the truth. He saw it whenever he closed his eyes.

He spent two nights in a cheap portside flophouse on Nar Shadaa, berthing the _Reminder _in a wild-looking Toydarian's garage. The moon masked his presence, its iron canyons thronging with unhealthy life. It was Coruscant in grubby miniature, a slum-world in Nal Hutta's bloated shadow. Hutt gang lords reigned over seas of crumbling tenements, five-credit slave brothels, and piss-stinking casinos where the drunk, the victorious, and the destitute mingled, tangled, and traded places.

This was the Republic he had fought for. A decrepit husk swaddled at the galaxy's heart in its old finery, its mirrors smeared with oil to keep its eyes from finding truth. _Slave markets, _he thought in the smoky darkness of his cheap, grimy room. _I saw them with my own eyes. Anakin was sold at one. His mother, too. A million, billion slaves crying out to the deaf and the heartless._

He had never taken the younger man back to Tatooine. Obi-Wan still remembered the day Anakin had asked. _He wanted to visit Shmi's grave. He was so frightened to ask me, so certain that I would pass judgment on his attachments. I did, though. I always judged him. Found him wanting. Too close to the world, too in love with his friends. Too open. Too angry._

He had failed the boy. Qui-Gon had left what might have been his greatest student in the hands of a small-hearted clerk, and Obi-Wan had performed accordingly. He had crushed and stymied Anakin at every turn, trying desperately to mold him into the archetypal Jedi, the man in the high tower with his eyes shut and his heart turned to stone.

Obi-Wan knew he had to move. Someone would report his ship, obviously military and just as obviously not his property. Someone would recognize his face from the printouts plastered on bounty boards around the city. He'd read a few of those. _Obi-Wan Kenobi, so-called Jedi Knight. Wanted for sedition, treason, and murder. _In the accompanying hologram he looked sinister and brutish, his beard a thorny thicket, his eyes narrowed, lip twisted in a killer's sneer.

Nar Shadaa would notice him sooner or later, and he had business to attend to. He knew where Anakin would be. Palpatine left no loose ends, and only one remained.

He just had to find the Confederacy.


	13. Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LACK OF FAITH

RUNE

Mustafar. With Sidious's betrayal certain they had not dared any of their more luxurious haunts, the massive ion-sheathed bunkers they'd built for themselves on a dozen remote rim worlds. No. Those places would be watched. CIS fleets were probably already burning in their atmospheres if Rune was any judge. On rocky, murderous, poison-aired Mustafar, they would be safe. Rune, lounging on a sun deck protected by a custom radiation field, thought of his staff he had abandoned on Coruscant and felt a twinge of guilt.

The cliffside compound was built alongside a broad, sluggish magma flow where teams of some insectile species Rune had never heard of used magnets to extract raw ore in silvery, melting globs from the river of fire. They went about tented in heat-retardant black vestments, eyes hidden behind goggles, long snouts encased in rebreathing filters. They had ceded their compound, a vast fortress ribbed with durasteel and shielded by intricate air-permeable energy fields from the heat, without complaint to the threat of Confederate guns and battle droids. A few floated by on a magma barge, their pole-like trawling wands held out over the flow. They watched Rune. He ignored them.

The holonet screamed constantly of Palpatine's coronation. The pundits were calling it a special investiture, an emergency reconstruction effort. The great man himself, scarred and jaundiced, looked appropriately somber in all the interviews. He sat in repulsor chairs, legs crossed, fingers interlaced, and spoke humbly of the work to come in repairing the damage the Civil War had done.

Rune had figured it out months ago. Palpatine and Sidious were either in league or else one and the same. He, or they, had played the galaxy like a fiddle. Now they were sweeping up the stage, re-tuning their strings. The fun was over. Time to govern.

"More wine," he told the protocol droid hovering at his elbow. The scream of ion engines split the smoking sky. Wat Tambor, standing by the sun deck's edge with his hands behind his back, let out a startled squawk as a TIE fighter with a cowled, raptor-like profile shot across the sky a quarter mile above the fortress. It was gone in a trice but Rune was already on his feet, fumbling inside his ver-silk robe for the useless holdout blaster he kept strapped to his upper arm.

"What is it?" Tambor shrieked, running in panicked circles.

"Shut up, you idiot," Rune hissed through gritted teeth. He squinted up into the ashy murk of the atmosphere, trying to mark the TIE's course. "Get inside and deploy the fuckingdroids."

Tambor turned, goggled countenance waxen, robes flapping in the arid breeze, and then a spear of blue-white light plunged through the heat-field and drove slantwise through his skull. Electronics popped and squealed. Blood spattered on the black fiberplanks of the deck. Tambor swayed, hands grabbing at nothing, and then fell. Sparks from his ruined rebreather unit made a halo around his bald green-yellow pate.

Skywalker hit the platform a moment later, landing on his feet in Tambor's odious blood. He bent, staggering, and straightened like a puppet pulled upright by its strings. The Jedi's skin was blistered, his scalp inexpertly shorn, his eyes jaundiced and underscored by black crescents. He held out a gloved hand and the lightsaber buried in Tambor's skull withdrew itself and thumped into his palm. Rune stared at the man, his bowels aquiver, his palm sweaty on the grip of his blaster.

"I'm going to kill you," Skywalker said.

"Alright," said Rune, shaking. He dropped his blaster and wiped his forehead with a clammy hand. "That's alright."

He turned his back on the Jedi. It was ten steps to the platform's edge. He gripped the rail, looking out over the cracked landscape. Magma flumes surged and burst in the distance. Ash rained down on the black rock plains and scabrous scarps. A covey of scaly avians came flapping out from the mouth of a cave across the burning river.

"Ugly fucking planet," Rune said.

It didn't hurt.

OBI-WAN

The remnants of the droid armada floated dead in the black around Mustafar. Obi-Wan let the autopilot take him in. The _Reminder_'s sensors tagged Anakin's fighter circling in a holding pattern over a mining facility near the planet's southern pole. He wasn't trying to hide. Obi-Wan could feel him there, a knot of empty guilt, rage, and fear churning like the sucking mouth of a maelstrom at sea.

He left the cockpit. His lightsaber hung at his belt, a scarred cylinder of metal and polygrip, its activation stud worn by the print of his thumb. _This was all I was, _he thought, turning it over in his hands. _How did it happen?_

In the ship's narrow hold the settled down cross-legged on the deck, hands upturned on his knees, and opened himself to the Force as the _Reminder _entered the planet's atmosphere. This time there was no struggle. It was a straight drop, breathless and tingling, to the waters that surged through the heart of the universe. He struck the flow and plunged beneath, bubbles streaming in his wake. He pulled for the surface with all his might, limbs thrashing at the ice-cold water. His head broke the surface and he sucked in air, struggling to tread water as he did.

The dead were waiting for him. They walked atop the raging current, calmness rippling out from their bare feet. Their shadows jumped and wavered like old flags caught in a tearing wind.

"Drink nothing," Qui-Gon said. His hair was greying. He smelled of blood and smoke.

"Master," Obi-Wan cried, reaching for the older man's robes. "Help me."

Qui-Gon knelt, arms open, and Obi-Wan ran to him down the echoing Temple hall. His Master faded, though, and a wall of water came rushing down the corridor. A woman ran before it, fleet and lean, her shaved head gleaming in the dark. "General Kenobi," she hissed through crooked teeth, lightsabers blazing to scarlet life in her hands. "What a pleasure."

She pirouetted to attack, shadows writhing around the island of red light she ran with, and then the river took him, sweeping him away into the bowels of the Temple where a woman in black wept by the bank, the hem of her skirt soaked in blood. She turned to watch him pass and he saw that her guts were bared by a horrible gash. "Surely," she said, her voice echoing in the moldering gloom, "there must be something you can do?"

"I'm so sorry," he said, but when he came out of the water and took her hand, she was no longer there. A hall loomed before him, boma-wood reliefs paneling its walls. The historical reliefs outside Palpatine's office. He moved forward, leaving the Temple basement behind, and traced the carvings with his fingers as he walked. The doors slid open at his approach and he stepped down into the Chancellor's sanctum. The man's great antique desk lay smashed against the wall, blood oozing out from under its wrecked bulk. Glass and fragments of pottery lay strewn on the floor like the spiral arms of dying galaxies.

Mace Windu sat cross-legged at the center of the wreckage. "Hello, Obi-Wan," he said, smiling. "Welcome back."

Behind him, the shattered windows yawned like mouths and the winds of the city-planet screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

"Destination," came the flat voice of the autopilot.

Obi-Wan rose and walked down the _Reminder_'s boarding ramp onto the smoking surface of a duracrete landing pad. Above him loomed a skeletal fortress of black stone and durasteel, its walls ribbed like the belly of a beast, its cooling towers clawing at the flanks of a mountain of basalt. Magma roared in rivers to the east and spilled in burning fingers over crumbling cliffs.

Anakin stood at the top of a narrow, crooked stair set into the cliffside and terminating in the shadow of the complex's vast arched entryway. Distance made him a cruel black spike, an iron nail discarded in the lee of the necropolis.

Obi-Wan drew his lightsaber, though he did not ignite it. _One last time, _he told himself.

The cries of children drifted on the wind. Ash blew over the landing pad.

ANAKIN

The Force had grown heavy. He dragged it behind him, his back bent under its leviathan weight, his wrists chafed raw by its acidic manacles. Behind him lay a lake of blood, the butchered leadership of the CIS choking the facility's empty halls. It hurt to breathe the planet's stinging atmosphere. It hurt to stand in the light of its dying sun. He squinted down at Obi-Wan, his eyes watering in the grit and heat. "Have you come to kill me?" he screamed, his voice raw.

The Jedi began to climb the mining facility's steep and winding stair. Anakin's chest felt tight. He paced the mouth of the entryway like a chained krayt dragon, bare feet slapping against blistering stone. His chapped lips twitched and curled over his teeth. The Force, like an anchor lashed to him by a bevy of chains, screeched and squealed over the rocks. His neck and the base of his skull burned with blinding pain. "I know you think I killed her," he threw into the wind. "I know the rumors about what I did in the Temple! It's lies, Obi-Wan!"

The Jedi climbed the steps in the red-black distance. His beard was uncombed and untrimmed, his red-brown hair greasy, slept on. He wore a simple grey tunic and leggings, and in his right hand was his unlit saber. Two hundred meters distant, he came on inexorably.

"You never believed in me!" the words blew spittle from his lips. He clutched at his own breast with his dead hand, his skeletal claw. He tore his glove off with difficulty and cast it aside so that the durasteel stood out stark against the ugly point of union with his stump. Irritated flesh. Old suture scars. "You were afraid of what you knew I could do! You held me back, made sure the Order kept me from getting what I wanted! What I _deserved."_

Obi-Wan did not slow. He did not quicken his pace.

"I loved you like a brother and you _ignored me," _the anger pulled at his heart, tugging like a whirlpool at the mouth of all the emptiness inside him where his furnace walls had broken. Columns shook. Dust rose from the stones and duracrete. He pointed with his claw, accusing. "Where were you when I buried my mother? Where were you when the rebels tried to kill my _wife?"_

He tasted iron and bile. Side effect of his exposure to the great battle station's core, though he couldn't remember it very well. The surgeon droids had removed the worst of his cataracts, injected him with a dozen chemical cocktails, and pronounced him fit for duty. He paced more quickly, as though by moving he could leave behind that blazing room, the body lying on the deck in a pool of its own congealing blood.

"I loved you." He flung it at the older man like a clod of filth. His voice was a vulturous screech, harsh and choked. "I _loved you, _Obi-Wan!"

Obi-Wan paused at the final step, hesitation written on his lined, strong features. He was shorter than Anakin remembered, drab and small and windswept in the fiery atmosphere. "I am sorry, Anakin," he said. His lightsaber ignited with a crackling hiss. "Please, forgive me."

Anakin flung himself at his old master. They crashed together in a tangle of limbs, rolling down the steps with bone-jarring force to come to a breathless halt on a windswept landing. With his living hand he seized the wrist of Obi-Wan's sword hand, and with his dead one he gripped the older man's throat. They stared at one another across a half-meter gulf, Anakin pinning his master against the scorching rock. Obi-Wan's eyes were clear and depthless, his expression one of sorrow. "Don't pity me," screamed Anakin. "I could crush you! I _will _crush you!"

He tightened his durasteel fingers, feeling tendons creak and muscles strain beneath their grasp. A feral smile split his sunburned face, displaying bloody gums. Sweat soaked the back of his coat. "Where did you take them, Obi-Wan? What did you do with my children?"

His false arm burst. Circuitry ruptured. Batteries shorted. Shards of metal pierced his skin as the skeletal claw came apart with a flash of red-white light and a deafening _bang. _He fell back against the stones, calling his lightsaber to hand with the Force, and scrambled away from Obi-Wan as the older Jedi lunged to his feet and swung. His lightsaber clove through Anakin's, shorting out the blade in a puff of evanescent bluish gas. Anakin's stump, still freighted by dead wiring, screamed with pain as he slumped back against the steps, the cliffs and the burning rivers hard on his left.

The point of Obi-Wan's lightsaber hovered at Anakin's throat. "It's over," the older man said. "Come with me, Anakin. It's over."

Things fell away from Anakin's soul. They fell wetly, weakly. Like rotten trees toppling. Dead stillness reigned in the wake of that putrid collapse. A black lake stretching on and on into eternity. He let out a long, rattling breath, and then he clasped Obi-Wan's hand in his own.

OBI-WAN

He hardly felt it coming. There was no warning ripple in the Force, no sign on Anakin's gaunt and blistered face. Their fingers laced together. Anakin's grip was like iron. "It isn't over," he hissed. "It will never be over." And then he pulled with all his might, broad shoulders twisting, neck straining, and Obi-Wan lost his footing.

They plunged together from the steps and toward the stones below. Blackness rushed up to greet them as Anakin clasped Obi-Wan close. The younger man's eyes were the yellow of festering sores, and when he bared his teeth they glistened with rot. The wind tore at them for a moment, a thundering plunge, and then they struck a hill of black shale together. Flesh tore. Bones broke. They came apart, rolling down the hillside as little landslides eddied out from where they'd landed. Obi-Wan scrambled to his feet, sinking up to his ankles in the sharp and shifting shale, and cast about for Anakin. _I have to finish this. _

The younger man surfaced, floundering, covered in pale lacerations. He screamed in pain and rage. Stones whirled around him as his anger smote the world. Below, a river of magma wound its way through the basin of a valley of basalt. Above, the mining fortress loomed like judgment. Anakin stood perhaps ten meters below Obi-Wan's uncertain position. He screamed again and stones, ash, earth, and wind assailed his old master. Obi-Wan waded forward down the hill, weathering Anakin's storm like a pillar of granite. Heat lightning crackled and snarled around them.

Anakin, his stump leaking blood and integument fluid, scrambled up the hillside like an insect. His hand was bloody, his face livid, and as he neared Obi-Wan he sprang up in a flying kick, one foot aimed straight at his master's jaw.

Too easy. Anakin struck the shale and slid a meter downslope on his back, mouth opening and closing like a fish's. The stumps of his legs smoked in the heat-rippling air. Obi-Wan deactivated his lightsaber and let the Force fall away, let himself feel the pain of his broken ankle, the strain of his torn biceps. His skull was fractured, three ribs cracked, two broken. He sobbed, crying out, and turned his face away from Anakin.

"Please," the voice was a crumbled wheeze. The voice was an empty house. The voice was blood in the Temple halls. "Please, kill me."

Obi-Wan's hand tightened on the hilt of his lightsaber. He looked back at his apprentice, at the emptiness behind the young man's eyes. The howling void enshrined in burnt and broken flesh.

He walked away without a word, limping through the shale along the cliffside. Ahead, a broken plain of stone. Below, the burning river.

ANAKIN

He screamed when they came for him, the ghouls in their white armor, faces skull-masked. He screamed and broke their bodies with his will. They swarmed over him like beetles, dragged him into the knotted intestines of their shuttle, and bore him back into the nothing-nothing-nothing between stars. Their minds were a pleasant, neutered hum of sameness.

Anakin wept like a child in the medical bay. Surgical droids washed his burned and lacerted skin in bacta. They stripped him of the remnants of his ruined arm. They pulled stone fragments from the stumps of his legs. He stopped crying. Stared at the ceiling like a corpse. The droids went about their plucking, picking work with fingers like needles and the legs of spiders.

On Coruscant Tarkin, that skeleton, met them at a secret hospital facility far from the light of the sun. They offloaded Anakin onto a crumbling duracrete pier over a gulf in the planet's fissured skin. Tarkin stalked beside the repulsor stretcher as the clones directed Anakin through the drizzling, filthy under-city rain and toward the durasteel doors of the hospital facility.

"The Emperor is attending peace talks with the rebel senators," said the senator. He drew out that word, _rrrebel, _like some aristocratic joke. "He wished me to express his deepest condolences."

"Leave," Anakin managed. Speaking felt like vomiting fire.

Tarkin bowed, a mocking light in his dead black eyes, and left.

The doors slid open. Inside, droids and surgeons bustled in an operating theater behind a duraplast airlock. Diagrams of droid prostheses cluttered the walls. Tanks of vitreous fluids bubbled and roiled. The stretcher glided through the doors, and Anakin closed his eyes as tears rolled down his furrowed, ruined cheeks.

The airlock hissed as it depressurized, pumping contaminated air back out into the city-planet. It cycled open. A surgeon's voice cut through the stony silence.

"We're ready to begin, Lord Vader."


	14. Chapter 14

EPILOGUE: FLOATING HOME

ASAJJ

She was tired. Weak. Her legs shook when she walked more than a dozen paces. Her vision was cloudy. Her nails were soft, the skin beneath them tender. She lay alone in the sleeping cell of the duracrete bunker, curled up like a child on her bare pallet. She slept twelve or thirteen hours a day in the dim lighting of the claustrophobic shelter. The pallet, the pantry with its recycled water tank and its shelves of freeze-dried meals, the tiny refresher unit, and the tank. It had disgorged her just three days ago, spilling her out onto the cold steel floor a mile below a nameless stretch of sand-floored canyon.

She had seen the outside on the vidcams. _Tatooine, _she thought. Sometimes womp rats swarmed around the cams, sniffing and gnawing. Once she saw a file of Tuskens passing, walking carefully in one another's footprints. She remembered a name. _A'Sharad Hett. _Limbs tangled in the heat of a bantha-hide tent. Sweat standing out on his forehead. The stark lines of his old tattoos.

She remembered things. Fragmented chunks of lives she'd lived and lost. They melded together like soft clay, twisting round and round until the hard edges began to blur. She remembered a fighter crash on Dantooine, a man who had killed her in a temple where water ran down stone walls in the dark. The man had come again and broken her a second time, crushing her throat with a look and a gesture. _I hate him, _she thought dully.

Moments later she thought, _I don't care._

She remembered the Count. He had found her, trained her, made love to her. She remembered the rasp of his unshaven cheek against her thigh. She remembered the feel of his eyes on her, the grandeur of him in the Force. He had been like an ancient tree, like the pounding tide. He had guided her into the wildernesses of her own power and showed her the monster waiting to avenge herself on the soft underbelly of a brutal galaxy.

She had spent twelve years on the streets. Long before her life splintered, before she awoke again and again behind new eyes, she had been a vrelt clinging by her teeth to the gristle of an unloving world. She had forgotten the name of her homeworld, but not the backwater town where her parents had abandoned her in a garbage-choked alleyway. On her second night outside the tank she had traced its streets on the back of her hand with a pen she'd found in the pantry. It had smudged and run when she'd showered in the refresher.

In the sleeping cell there was a little holoscreen that showed the vidcams' readouts. The interface had a message recorded by Dooku, a little blinking indicator at the corner of the screen. She hadn't watched it yet. Each day she woke late, ate tasteless porridge, drank a nutrient solution laced with a cocktail of drugs, and laid on her pallet until sleep came again. She dreamed of a man with a fleshless arm, a talon of bone and sinew reaching for her throat. His eyes were dying stars, his mouth a pit behind the walls of rotten teeth.

There was a hatch in the pantry. It was a round airlock set in the low durasteel ceiling, its locking wheel well-oiled. Each day she looked at it while she ate at the cramped, tiny table. It led to the surface, she knew. _I'm too weak to climb a ladder, _she told herself. It wasn't true, though. She was stronger every day. Her thoughts were clearer, her memories fuller.

She remembered poor, sad Jango Fett. Confused man, hiding his wounds like a wild animal. Dooku and Palpatine had mauled his memory, blending drugs, surgery, and manipulation through the Force until his psyche, and the psyches of his half-dozen clones, had shattered utterly. He had been, for a little while, a complacent sap, just enough of his warrior grit left to make him rugged for the cameras. It had come back, though, or Palpatine had sniffed it coming back, and then they had given whatever iteration of the Mandalorian the chop and rolled out a new clone in his place.

_Dooku did it to himself, _she realized one day. _He hid me so that even Palpatine wouldn't know. Not for me, though. Not him. _

The message would reveal the truth. Perhaps, she thought, he _had _given her the gift of one last clone without expectation. When she looked at the blinking light, though, she knew he hadn't. It would be a list of names, a series of targets intended as the recipients of Dooku's real last bequests. Blood. Fire. Death. Or maybe there were other clones out there, hidden in the corners of the rim. Clones of her. Clones of him. She thought about listening to it, about seeing his face one last time.

She crawled back to her pallet and lay staring at the screen.

That night she did not dream of Skywalker.

She walked beside her master on the blasted soil of Korriban, throne-world of the Lords of the Sith. Great temples lined the valley. Mountains reared above them on either side, the horns of some great dragon rising up from poisoned rock. The planet had been the bastion of the Sith Empire at its glorious height, the jewel of sorcerer-tyrants like Marka Ragnos and Naga Sadow. Now it was a stone in the void, and its days were done. Dooku walked ahead of her, robed in black, his face bare but lost in shadow. He looked back and his voice was as she remembered it.

"These are the masters of the earth and the void," he had said, gesturing out at the valley an its temples. "These are the kings of the quick and the dead."

Beyond him, at the valley's end, lay the open desert. Behind them was its twin in sallow grey. Statuary hands half-buried in the shifting sand. Grit blowing in the wind, the keening wind, and before the last and greatest of the vast temple-mausoleums, a gnarled immensity of rock that clawed for the sky's belly with its spires and towers, stood two vast and trunkless legs of stone.

Nothing besides remained of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare.

The lone and level sands stretched far away.


End file.
